A Populace Needs to be Educated

If I had one wish, it would be to time the bottom of the market. I would find some money and put it in and ride the next wave to financial glory. Of course, it is a wish, for as we have been told through our formative years, there is no way to time the market. Nevertheless, we have pundits, daily, trying to call the bottom. It seems that we are already so sick of the financial pain that we need to wrap it up and get to the next level. Sorry lads and lasses, no generation gets away with everything.

We would not be well-rounded citizens if we did not feel the pain and make no mistake about it, there is plenty more pain to come. Me, I am just calling for a showing of the hands, someone, anyone, brave-up and tell the truth and let us know how much you really need AIG? GMAC? and the rest of you clowns hiding from a real valuation of those so-called toxic assets. AIG, what would it really cost to cover those bets? GE Money/GE Capital, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, how much of those bets did you make? The best thing that the government can do now is to order all of these financials hiding behind their faux balance sheets to tell us the real deal.

If Obama is to be praised for a "true up" of the 2010 budget as he strives to incorporate all government expenses - all off-the-books expenditures like the costs for war and the deficiencies in the AMT and other budget machinations, i.e. no bid contracts and the like, why are we not demanding this from the companies who we are bailing out? Where are the forensic accountants when you need them? At this point in this dismal economic cycle, we need to know how much of these off-the-books assets are out there. Today, I am hearing that Bernanke wants to inject a trillion dollars into the shadow banking system, the system where all of these off-the-books assets reside like those credit swap derivatives.

We sit around and complain that there is no transparency in the system but we are not demanding answers. We need an independent citizens brigade to track all of these taxpayer dollars that are being injected into the financial system. At the very least, the taxpayer should know how much and to whom all of this money is being given. We should be protesting over this but our own financial woes are crippling us. Who has time to check out who the government is giving money to when our own personal financial lives are in shambles? I have been out of work 3 months; this milestone is now resonating on a daily basis. The reality has set in that the return on resume submission is dismal, there has been only one interview for nearly 50 submitted. These are not the type of odds that step up the employment quotient though I am hearing that I am lucky to have had one callback.

The bigger question is why I have not been able to get to the bottom of this financial crisis in all of its complexity. Previous recessions were explainable but this most recent debacle is rooted in financial instruments that we, the taxpayer, simply do not understand. There needs to be a whole-hearted effort on the part of the media and the government to explain the elements and educate a society on its new role as financial savior. Now we have people taking sides, even myself, trying to simplify the matter, saying bloviated statements like "let them fail," "no more bailouts," and "the democrats are mortgaging the future" and so on. What is the truth? I am being led to believe that while the government is supposedly bailing out AIG, GE, GM, and the rest of those fat-cats under some dubious rubric of "too big to fail," they are not explaining the real reason; the devasting financial shock to the worldwide banking/financial system of valuing all of those derivatives.

If this is true, then it needs to be explained to the American people. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We do not want the financial equivalent of the post 9-11 exhortation of "go out and shop, carry on as you normally do" response to crisis, we should be demanding a real appraisal of what we are getting into with these continued bailouts. If the situation is dire, tell us. Last fall, businesses were planning on a turnaround during the second half of this year. We have now reached the reality stage where it is clear that the turnaround may not happen until 2010 or beyond. I might have planned better last Fall if I had known that. Facts need to be faced. A populace needs to be educated.