Hocking the Family Jewels

They gambled and they lost, and now they have to pay. Live by the capitalism sword, die by the capitalism sword.

And better they should pay with their hard assets than my tax dollars.

Yeah, why be a criminal if you can't be cool?

I will agree that indeed agree that the bottom is not yet in view in any predictable fashion and ,tritely, won???t know until it is well past, my view is perhaps more ominous. I see us that instead of looking into a dark well; we are viewing a yawning vortex whose dimensions??? we cannot yet plumb.

Your assertion that in balance this has been conservative administration is more willful blindness, than realistic appraisal. The so-labeled ???neo-con???s??? incitement of reckless abandon in foreign policy and aggressive war-making and reputed war-crimes is not conservative.

The accumulation of unfundable debt and asset depreciation is unprecedented, and is in essence antithetical to any Republican-Conservative policy position I know.

The unbelievable degradation of our military readiness both short and long term is certainly a threat to any claim of superpower status.

Will our final epithet also be ???Alas Babylon????

With all due respect, if you think that the worst of the housing debacle is behind us, I think you're dead wrong. We've got 2 more years of option ARM and prime loans ready to reset and home prices keep sinking. A chart of housing prices over the past 10 years (especially in once hot markets like California and Florida) will show you that prices have a ways further to fall. We had better hope that a critical mass of people don't decide to walk away from their mortgages and just start over. If that happens, we're in total meltdown as the banks can't keep up these losses forever. Wachovia is a goner and it's 50/50 on Citi.

Look at this another way, if the Fed has taken to buying stock in Freddie and Fannie, that just smacks of desperation, especially in an adminstriation as conservative as this one. The Fed has completely run out of ammo to fight the next problem. They're lending money to anyone and everyone and eventually, the world is going to cry "Enough!" and shut us down. Buckle your seat belt, this will last until 2011 or 2012.