Why I'm Angry

With so much going on in the economy, it's easy to be scared and confused. How did this terrible thing happen? How is this going to affect me and my money? What's going to happen next? How long will the recession last?

I don't know the answer to the last three questions but I'm angry about how it all happened. It all happened because in 1999 Congress deregulated the banking industry, allowing commercial banks and investment banks to "consolidate into a single institution which had essentially free reign to offer everything from passbook savings accounts to speculative financial investments such as commodities trading and credit default swaps. It is the credit default swaps that got us in trouble when the housing mortgage market collapsed. Suddenly, banks lost billions of dollars on their books and people couldn't get the credit they needed for their day-to-day activities. So, then the government bails out these banks because they are "too big to fail." The very people who got us into this mess is getting help from us, the American people. Many ask, "Well, who's going to bail us out if we lost our jobs and our retirement savings and now we can't pay our bills?" The same banks who are getting bailed out by us are now increasing our credit card interest rates.

And now, the big banks are saying, "We are big and strong, we don't need the bailout money. We were forced to take it but now we're returning it because we don't like the restrictions that come with the money we took. We want to pay our executives unreal sums of money and bonuses and to h--- with everyone else!" Except, what the big banks didn't say was that they screwed up big time and that the very people they're paying huge salaries and bonuses to are the same people who created this crisis in the first place. The banks are trying to tell the government that they don't want to be told what to do. Well, the president, the treasury secretary, and the Fed Chairman need to stand firm and not back down. The government runs this country, not the banks.

And another thing: In a situation like this, it's natural to just want to blame somebody. Well, it's not just one somebody that's culpable. There are many people who bear responsibility:

• the investors who want big returns, not caring how it got there,
  
• the banks who thought they were so smart to come up with such risky and complicated investments,
  
• the people who couldn't afford the huge homes they bought,
  
• the lenders who sold the subprime mortgages,
  
• the Congress who decided to relax laws regulating banks, and
  
• the regulators who were supposed to be the watchmen.

Maybe we all just got a little too greedy and too complacent during the good times.

That's my two cents!