Almost Classical

There is little doubt that the last two years are the result of lax SEC enforcement under Chairman Cox (R) and the Bush (R) administration took far too long to react to such nonsense as credit default swaps. Add to this the Democratic Congress' refusal to control Freddie and Fannie... here are the results: January 3, 2007 - Democratic Congress seated - DOW = 12,398 November 4, 2008 - Barack Obama elected - DOW = 9,625 (down 22.3%) January 20, 2009 - Barack Obama sworn in - DOW = 8,228 (down 14.5%) February 18, 2009 - Barack Obama signs "stimulus package" into law - DOW = 7,556 (down 8.2%) Close on Thursday February 26, 2009 - DOW = 7,182 (down 5.0%) In terms of decline alone: Total market collapse since Democrats took control of Congress - DOW down 42.0% Total market collapse since Obama elected - DOW down 25.4% Total market collapse since Obama sworn in - DOW down 12.7% And today, the GSEs announce that they need more taxpayer...

There were 200,000 "financial industry" layoffs during fiscal 2007-08 and nearly another 150,000 since this previous summer. Bank of America and Citi announced more than 70K layoffs in 2008, alone. In fact, CNN has reported that layoffs in finance outpace the layoffs in manufacturing this year. That's no small accomplishment. Most people in "finance" are not millionaires. I know. I worked at both a mortgage bank and a title insurance company in the past. The majority of workers were women, inputing data and making low wages. Many of the employees had only high school diplomas and they worked very hard, long hours. (The disparity between the workers and the executives was extremely unbalanced.) I'm sick of hearing people celebrate "Wall Street" layoffs. Sure, there are fat, greedy pigs at some companies. There are scum in most industries -- it's just easier to hate bankers and lawyers. But when a bank closes or an investment firm fails, it...