Today's Hot 100

Well maybe not 100, but a lot of things going on in the world to feel disenfranchised about.

The Vice Presidential debate sucked, yea it was lame. I wonder if there is a leader out there somewhere that can think on their feet and speak intelligently about almost anything related to our economy and the United States foreign policy without the "he said," "she said" blame game.

A bunch of rich fat cats screwed up and now they want the United States government to give them money so their kids can live like Paris Hilton.

Our current economic mess is very much like the Enron saga.
Let us review: a bunch of guys got together to form a company that would bet on energy prices (that was Enron) in effect they were speculating that energy prices would go up and if they purchased "energy futures" at a lower price betting the price would go up when they sell the "energy" then bada bing, bada boom, were all rich! There were a few major flaws with this idea, the first flaw was they were greedy and the second was that they were manipulating the energy prices and they got caught. How does all this related to our current mess, you ask?

A bunch of people that lend money to other people got together and decided, "hey, lets lend money to people who have no chance of paying it back." and then what we will have is what is commonly called "bad paper."

Another group of people got together and decided that, "hey, lets buy a bunch of loans and resell them to someone else for a profit." (this is the part I think is like the Enron deal, buy something for $2 and sell it to the next guy for $4, all the while manipulating the value of the original item)

So, all these people (banks, and financial institutions) are buying all these loans (a lot of them are "bad paper") just betting that they can sell them to some other bank or financial institution like some game of "hot potato" and the bank that get stuck with all the bad paper in the end loses!

Guess who got stuck with all the "bad paper," in the end?

Give up, well it's you and me the tax paying public citizens of the United States.

And that is just a small sampling of the "Crap-tastic" things that have been going down lately.