aaaugh!!!

What is it going to take to get the morons of the media and the government to understand that this economic crisis has nothing to do with "losing money?" Everyone is bitching about how much money has been "lost," and nothing of the sort has happened. What has happened is that people who were at points of power managed, by selling unregulated dilutions of financial instruments, to inflate the value of what real money was held by the system, got themselves paid massive commissions of real money based upon these inflated values, after which the house of cards they had built in order to extract these massive commissions promptly and inevitably collapsed, leaving the people who had been convinced that the elaborate houses of cards that they owned were extraordinarily valuable to suddenly find that they were worthless piles of paper. In other words, the bulk of the financial institutions gamed the world, got paid for it, and are now being given money by the countries that they bilked to make up for the money that the financial institutions themselves pocketed. The only money that has disappeared has gone straight into the coffers of the wealthy. The paper was never worth money in the first place, it was the means of siphoning money. We are giving money to the people who robbed us to replace the money that they stole from us. The plummeting stock market is not losing money, it is slowly determining the real value of what is left and will continue to drop until the value of the market is related to the actual value of what has been not looted. The bush-inspired 14,000 DOW was worth what the DOW is worth now, but the deregulation and lack of oversight of finance in this country permitted the financiers who were stripping the real value away from it to get paid for inflating it and walk away scot-free when reality came calling. They are mostly crooks and we, as a country, are now papering over their crimes and pretending that some horrible and unforeseen catastrophe has struck when in reality this was all a carefully planned game of three-card-monty on a historic scale.

The guillotine looks more like the right reward for these titans of commerce every day.