Give me Leverage and I will move the world

It's all about money. Money is the way. Money is credit. Money is the Crisis. Money, American Money, has been almost totally devalued.

The notion that years of systemic banking failure, misguided allocation of capital, and general economic lunacy could have been reversed or avoided by co-ordinated (sloppy), measured (hastily) drafted legislation was and remains a ridiculous notion.

The consumption and spending patterns of a country of 250 million people cannot be predicted with anything resembling accuracy so discount stimulus packages. If you know that there is a storm brewing you batten down the hatches. So where is there a shred of sanity in committing half a country's GDP to 'saving' the banking system?

Does anybody else remember a few months ago when nearly every condescending media pundit was saying something like "70 billion dollars for AIG is piss in the ocean compared to the size of our GDP Har. Har. Har."

True, I guess, using some perverse kind of arithmetic, but the point is 70 billion here, 700 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about 7.6 trillion dollars committed to moribund financial institutions...

Well money is a strange thing. You work for it, you inherit it, you find it buried on a carribean island, or you can print it. The problem with the last option is when you print lots and lots of pieces of green paper and trade them for big cars and flat tv screens the people you've traded with are going to cop on eventually.