But really, a lot of us should be pointing fingers at ourselves...

Excuse me. I didn't tap into my home's alleged value. I paid my mortgage off, and I've been trying to save money ever since.

Unfortunately, Bush & Co. have been running the money printing presses as fast as they can to pay for huge increases in spending after they cut taxes. This is destroying the value of my savings faster than I can save.

What's really annoying is that I'm trying to do what Bush said I should do: Save money myself rather than counting on Social Security. It would be nice if he'd given me a chance to succeed when I followed his advice.

So what? The creation of bad mortgages should have stopped when they became numerous enough to be a problem, but Wall Steet invented a wonderful way to hide the problem and sell it to someone else. That's how we got into a multi-trillion dollar mess.

But mostly it's about trying to distinguish himself from McCain, when there is really no difference at all.

I beg to differ. McCain wants to give billionaires even more tax breaks so they can screw us harder and faster. Obama doesn't.

Be that as it may, I think the real problem wasn't the mortgages themselves, but rather the securitization that allowed junk mortgage debt to be repackaged and sold as AAA-rated securities. This completely disconnected the mortgage originators from the consequences of bad loans and dumped the problem on unsuspecting parties downstream.

... one of the chief ones is a policy put into place more than 15 years ago by the Clinton administration, which would punish mortgage lenders for not giving loans that previously would have been rejected as too risky

So why didn't the fiscally savvy and responsible Bush administration put an end to this?

... McCain will say pretty much the same things and pretend that's what he's been saying all along. Mainstream media will ignore what Obama said and report what McCain says, and they won't call McCain out for yet another flip-flop. People who aren't paying attention will believe it's McCain's idea.

I used to think these hearings were political theater to try to fool voters into thinking congress was "doing something". Now they don't even bother to pretend to do anything, so what's the point of holding the hearings?

The Fed should raise rates a 1/4 point, and continue incrementally.

If the Fed cuts interest rates any more, the tiny interest on savings accounts won't be adequate compensation for the risk of keeping money in a bank. I think further cuts could cause a run on the banks, which is probably the last thing we need right now.

OTOH, higher rates might encourage savings that could help replenish the banks' asset base.

The shorter the wavelength, the better. Gamma rays are best of all. Be sure to enjoy the health benefits of gamma rays at every possible opportunity. Perhaps you could beef up your foreign policy chops with a visit to Chernobyl.

In other words, the only hope for the housing market is to get some more income into Joe and Jane Sixpack's wallets.

Who knows, maybe Salon's dream will come true and Hugo Chavez will buy his way to the Presidency of the US.

I don't see where you got the idea that this is Salon's dream.

Be that as it may, the surest way to make this happen is to continue our country's commitment to oil. "Drill, drill, drill" is music to OPEC's ears because they know we can't possibly satisfy our oil thirst for long when we only have a small fraction of the world's oil supply. The false hope of drilling our way to unlimited cheap oil also advances another OPEC agenda by dampening investor interest in alternate energy.

Conservatives love to wax poetic about America's know-how and can-do, but the last thing they want is for us to use those virtues to knock king oil off it's throne by inventing something better.

Only half those cuts are projected to be in the US.

Perhaps, but HP's planned cuts are only a tiny fraction of the job losses that are going on all across the country.

A number of economists have opined that the housing market has to bottom out before we'll see the end of the current financial mess. I don't think that will happen as long as living costs are climbing and peoples' incomes aren't. Wall Street desperately needs the one thing they've worked hardest to destroy, which is Joe Sixpack's paycheck.

I bet I know of at least one party she'd like to castrate right about now-- Bristol's boyfriend.

I don't think so. A population explosion would be a good way to hasten the arrival of armageddon and rapture, and Palin wouldn't want to set that plan back.

That's 24,600 in THREE years (by 2011)

True, but it's still 24,600 less jobs, and 24,600 more people looking for jobs.

I wonder how many more mortgage foreclosures this will cause? There was a time when one could sell one's house to pay off a mortgage, but that doesn't work very well when house prices have tanked. These days, a homeowner losing a decent-paying job is likely to result in another foreclosure.

Perhaps Wall Street should think about whether or not they want to reward this kind of corporate behavior. They've been rewarding it for years, and look where it got them.

This time around the press is actually jumping on the McCain as liar narrative rather than the Obama as elitist ...

I wonder if mainstream media has been watching the financial armageddon on Wall Street and figured out that their usefulness would end if this country collapsed.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/15/74531/5933/788/599244

It seems that at least some of McCain's "bounce" might have been the result of Gallup changing models at a time when doing so made McCain look good.