Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...

My wife thinks I am a very angry man. Considering that this opinion of hers makes me angry, she is probably right. But I have decided to share with you one of the - admittedly legion - things that makes me particularly apoplectic these days:

MAIN STREET vs. WALL STREET

This rhetorical device, rammed down our throats by the media and politicians, should be tremendously irksome to all intelligent people, regardless of political preference. Gentle reader, without Main Street there is no Wall Street!!! Without people in Des Moines and Shreveport borrowing money to buy things they cannot afford, there is no steady stream of bank loans which need to be packaged and sold as securities. Without folks in countless suburbs leveraging their incomes to buy and/or build mini-mansions, there would be no flow of high LTV mortgages packaged into mortgage-backed securities. There are plenty of hard-luck people out there who lost jobs or suffered an illness that left them unable to service their loans - credit card debt, mortgages, Fingerhut. These unfortunates are statistically present in every pool of loans a bank makes. Loan losses cannot be avoided because the world is an uncertain place and life sometimes throws us a curve (or a googlie, if anyone in the Commonwealth is reading). But the overheated borrowing I witnessed as a banker performing due diligence on loan pools is a social ill that is driven by all of us and not by those who finance it. People leasing vehicles they have no business driving and buying consumer goods they have no reasonable expectation of owning but for easy credit. But folks: we wanted the easy credit just like we wanted that waffle iron cum sandwich maker cum pants press we saw on QVC and by George, we were going to have it.

We all had dreams these past ten years. Everybody wants what Bill Gates has or Warren Buffett. Failing that, we want what our college classmates have. We live in a society where worth is measured by the size of your balance sheet. This is not a uniquely American trait, but it is certainly at its most evident in this country. The can do mentality that made the United States an economic and military force has given way to a must have mindset that may be its downfall. But whatever you do, look in the mirror for someone to blame. Blaming some guy in a pinstripe suit is like blaming the guy who sells you beer for your hangover.