Nightmare on Main Street?

Wow Peachtree City, I woke up this morning from a terrible dream.  Hmmm…in the movies Freddie Krueger normally got to you when you fell asleep.  But he let me continue to dream, or was it!  Well, when I woke up our economic world did not blow up during the night.  But what I saw in my dream was another outbreak of serious financial trouble.  The decades of irresponsible over-creation of excess money and credit by Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve along with the rest of the central banks of the world, were wreaking their inevitable damage.

Maybe I’m just paranoid and worried about my kids in college and creditors trying to drive me to suicide with their incessant demands for more money, more money, It’s always more money!  Is that not just enough to worry about?

Okay, perhaps I am in shock from this whole thing.  But the way I see it while total Fed credit went down by a massive $19.3 billion dollars last week, how does that compared to the $142 billion increase of the previous week, which despite my deadened senses, still merits a deathly gasp!

You know I can remember my mom saying that growing old is inevitable it the growing up that the real challenge.  So maybe I am finally growing up, But I seemed to be going into childishly hysterical.. you know when you used to cry and couldn’t stop even though you wanted too..or because your folks told you there was more to come if you didn’t… Anyway, that is the feeling I got from hearing that our government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers.  My friends, that is half the value of everything produced in the U.S. last year! All to rescue the financial system since the credit markets
seized up 15 months ago?

It was like Freddie was killing me slow.  A thousand little cuts was leading to a massive blood letting.  I could not think straight as my brain went into convulsions. The average increase in Federal Reserve credit was only $10 billion per month during the Greenspan years that created the bubble, and now the Fed is lending 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.  OMG! We’re freaking doomed!

So there I was laying on the floor waiting for an ambulance to get here. Clutching my heart, I was laughing and coughing up blood at the sheer irony of American taxpayers loaning $7.4 trillion dollars! Again, half of our GDP! Folks, the problem is that American taxpayers are already up to their ears in debt and can’t make payments as it is; American corporations are up to their ears in debt, and all the federal, state and local governments are up to their ears in debt.  I can hear them laughing, mocking us for our stupidity.  “We are smarter than you anyway,” I could hear them snickering in the distance…

Gasping for breath I shouted back, “I have some bad news for the government! The taxpayers are not prepared to loan anything to you! Can’t you see our total debt-to-GDP is over 350% already, maybe 450%, which is the highest of anything we’ve seen in U.S. history including the heights of the Roaring Twenties boom that preceded the Great Depression!

Then there was silence.  Perhaps it is because nobody cares about me, or perhaps because $7.4 trillion is already a big freaking number that defies reasonable comprehension. This unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s. 

But this, as horrifying as it is, is typical government crap, and if you want a good example of the kind of governments we have, I read in a article that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said his administration had to pay out $800 million to companies that over paid their business tax but wouldn’t send $400 property-tax rebate checks due this month to owners of apartments and houses because the slowing economy threatens to worsen a widening budget gap. What the hell is going on!!!!

I wipe the tears of either sadness or laughter from my eyes.  With what seemed to be my last breath I asked Freddie why he let me live to see this.. He fiendishly smiled and stated that Seeing the way the government is stealing the buying power of the currency, confiscating our tax money, taking away our homes and jobs..and our dignity is just outright theft.  Although Freddie thrived on the innocent, even this was too much violence and death for him.  But to get paid a visit by Freddie all you had to do is fall asleep.  America we have fallen asleep at the wheel.

I woke up..Whew!  What a dream…or was it!  The truth of the matter is that the American dream could turn into the American Nightmare on Main Street…your street, my street!  It affecting all of us!  Unfortunately it seemed like we stopped giving a damn about each other some time ago.  Maybe now we will realize that its time to go back to the things that really made our country great! 

Don’t remember….you’d better ask somebody!