I do not know about anyone else, but I am sickened to the point of porcelain worship by the stock, commodities, and futures markets! What really get me is that all these exchanges are nothing more than glorified casinos. The brokers are gamblers betting on how close to their predictions of a companies profit, growth, etc the company actually gets. So one of if not the most controlling factors of our economy is high profit, high loss, high risk organized gambling plain and simple. And just like in Vegas only the house (in this case the brokers, brokerage houses, investment groups, and hedge funds) wins in the long run; like now with the economy tanking, unemployment growing by leaps and bounds, home loss through the roof, families and children without food, shelter, or health insurance, the brokers et al who have made the bad and/or criminal bets are getting millions running into billions in bonuses, some of the money is tax payer money, as reward for sending the economy down the toilet. These people do not in any sense make anything, other than profit for themselves; they artificially generate profit by buying and selling artificial products among themselves, like little bundles of toxic mortgage debt whose value they set by gambling. And thanks in large part to Republicans (although they are not quite alone in this, they are the major players) like Phil Graham and his wife Wendy Lee,(Wendy is a real piece of something: she headed Regan's Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1988-93 and when Enron lobbying efforts got it exempt from CFTC regulation in the trading of energy derivatives (and we all know how well that turned out) she left the CFTC to take a seat on the Enron board of directors, as part of the Audit committee, all the while recieving 'donations' to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where at present she chairs the Regulatory Studies Program, based I am sure on her sterling performance with the other Enron directors in paying 168 million in a suit by the University of California, 13 million paid by her and the others for insider trading and the other 155 million paid by insurance, Wendy also sat on the boards of Iowa Beef Producers, INVESCO Funds, The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but for me her greatest hit was in 2002 when her anti-regulatory zeal in her involvement in the Bush administration OMB hit list of federal environmental regulations targeted to be changed or rescinded to the benifit of polluting oil, coal and other energy corporation, like the EPA's 'new source reviews and the clean air roll back, 'nice lady'. Phil Graham wrote/sponsored laws and pushed hard to further the deregulation of the stocks, commodities, and banking industries (later becoming John McCain's chief economic advisor), letting them become less and less stable and more and more profitable to a very small minority (continually concentrating 95+% of Americas wealth into the coffers of less than 2% of the population.) Then you get a Republican mouthpiece like Rick Santelli, some sort of CNBC commentator/expert, who is something of a cross between a race handicapper/odd maker and a horse race announcer for the markets and a proud supporter of loser McCain and a 21st century preacher of the old original protestant work ethic (where how much money you have is a direct indicator of how good a christian you are and how much god loves/favors you, regardless of how you make the money such as the slave trade, slavery, indentured servitude, they have never been concerned with the ethics of how the money was made) playing at 'let's undermine the economic recovery and President Obama', because a chosen few are profiting and the people who are in trouble and need the recovery to work are losers and slackers ( and a very few maybe) deserving of this man made disaster because they are just bad people, that his god does not like, andthe rest of America is just acceptable collateral damage. He like many others particularly the 'Just say No' Republicans seem to like to ignore(Oh boy more intentional selsctive stupidity) the unregulated greed and potentially criminal practices of greedy, rich banks, bankers, brokers, brokerage houses, and hedge funds who were given 350 billion with no oversight, no restiction, and no accountability by a Republican President and his administration and that they seem to think is just fine.
And then there was the UBS, a Swiss bank, toadie wailing about unsubstantiated rumored plans to nationalize the banks. This is the same UBS when all of this started to break and the causes were coming to light, was telling its people Not to travel to the U.S. as there was a very good chance of them being arrested and charged with crimes related to the meltdown. Also the same UBS now making history for not only getting slapped wit ha huge fine for knowingly helping its American customers avoid paying U.S. taxes by illegally hiding their wealth in secret anonimous UBS accounts but UBS is being forced to break the Swiss banking code of secrecy and anonymity and release all the relevant documentation and information for those illegal accounts. I wonder, with anticipatory glee, if the other Swiss banks or the Swiss goverment will force UBS to close its Swiss operations and leave the country, because UBS has damaged the much valued and vaunted secret and anonymous banking system. One can only hope, but not for much considering the Swiss banking history with the Nazis and the lenghts to which they went and are still going to retain contol/owenership of the monies of those killed by thr Nazis.