Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Their replies to the Lehman Brother's recent meltdown emphatically demonstrate that they are not equipped in understanding how to deal with the current economic crisis in general.  Their response essentially is, "Well, we'll let market forces handle things so that we don't accept responsibility.  That is American because it represents true free market thinking!"

Obama had mentioned:

"(He) fundamentally thinks this is a real reminder of the bad decisions made both on Wall Street and Washington and the need to modernize our financial regulatory structure to prevent these types of problems."

But what does he mean exactly by "the need to modernize our financial regulatory structure?"  These words are vague and demonstrate no concrete forward thinking as to exactly how to handle the crisis.  Yes, Wallstreet is to blame.  Everyone knows that.  Everyone knows that Wallstreet is filled with crooks and nepotism.  But that does mean that we need a concrete plan for pulling the banks and the people losing their money out of this situation.

McCain's crew said little more than:

"I have not heard of any proposal for taxpayer money (to be used) ... and obviously that would be something that is not anyone's first choice."

Well, naturally 99% of American citizens would be upset at bailing out a bunch of rich crooks.  Yet at the heart of this statement is no concrete plan.

I did some reading the other night about the Great Depression.  It's interesting to see what America did to partly bail itself out.  One of the most critical aspects was heavily regulating Wallstreet.  Apparently, many of those regulations were lifted in the 70's and 80's.  One has to wonder how much money these people put into politicians' pockets to get those regulations lifted.

Still, if we're heading into a depression, the first we should do is restrict Wallstreet.  I see Wallstreet as being too dangerous of a place to be the sole indicator of people's lives.  You can't just let a bunch of money grubbing crooks being allowed to dictate the course of American's lives.

Partly, I think you gotta change the way people are allowed to make money on Wallstreet.  Everything should be impartially driven, completely automated by computer systems (it will be but that's a slow movement).  Remaining traders should have limits imposed in terms of the money they make.  Analysts should not be allowed to work for the securities firms directly.  In fact, there should be limits on how much money they make as well.  Then you have the executives.  You need to impose a lot of restrictions on their power.  Prevent them from giving themselves raises, things like that.  Anything to prevent corruption by greed.  That's the key in controlling Wallstreet.

The biggest problem with Wallstreet is that it's a game and people bend the rules all the time by creating new rules to their advantage or slithering between holes.    I see investment banking/Wallstreet as something where companies use to fund their companies to grow and where people can use invested money for retirement.  The problems in Wallstreet occur when investment becomes gambling.  You stop treating investment as a long term plan and transmorgrify it into a short term speculation. 

Top to bottom, you have to investigate the way these places are done.  The housing crisis should not have occurred because both home owners and lenders got greedy in seeing a chance to develop a non-existent market.   The thing is that these people are financially trying to make money in new areas wherever possible.  But there are limits to growth.  Perhaps that's where a true regulatory body needs to step in and say, "Hey, here's the true market cap.  Here's a hard restriction."  Prevent bubbles from overexpanding.  Use hard numbers based on real income, population, etc. to derive how much a sector is worth.  Then cap it to prevent the bubble from bursting.

At any rate, neither candidate leaves me much confidence for the future of America with regards to the financial crisis.  Hopefully, more Americans read between the lines when they vote.  Actually, I hope that Americans won't vote at all to protest the fact that both candidates can't even handle a major situation like this.