When Joe the Banker would interview a potential buyer, and really wanted to know if they had a prayer of paying the loan back? Because it was JOE'S MONEY on the line? Joe the Banker, on the Main Street of old, had some significant skin in the game.

What about making those loan fees payable over a period of, say, five years? Ten years? Fifteen years? Add some language about the loan originator paying back the fees if the mortgage holder defaults. So Jack the Mortgage Broker has to dip into his own personal checking account and pay it back if Bob the Borrower defaults. So that our financial system begins thinking about the long term, not just the short term. The home buyer sure ought to be thinking about the long term, and so should everyone involved in the transaction.

Once again, I find myself writing on behalf of kids who want to dress and act as the other gender. It's OK one way, not the other. The rules for girls are very different than the rules for boys.

How many of us know girls who are rough-and-tumble tomboys, who never don a dress from one year to the next, who play soccer, softball, legos, and race toy cars? In general our society supports that. I can think of two or three girls in our acquaintance who are like this. It's no big deal for a girl to dress, act, and even cut her hair as a boy's. The girl I'm thinking of doesn't use the boy's restroom, but at first glance I'd think she's a boy. She's dressed and acted this way since she was a toddler, as her own preference. Will this girl grow up to be gay or transgender? Who knows? Who cares? She's fine for now. She has parents who love her. Our society allows her to be who she is--a girl who would rather play football and has never owned a Barbie. While some girls have bike baskets with pink flowers, this girl has a thing on her bike that makes engine noises. In pre-adolescence, that's all that matters. In adolescence (coming soon for this girl), she'll have to work things out for herself and figure out who she's attracted to, but my guess is she'll come out fine. She seems like a well-adjusted, tomboyish kid.

However, turn the tables to a boy who wants to dress as a girl, and we all collectively freak out. All of a sudden you have therapy, worry about gayness, worry about transgenderism, and it has to be a deep dark secret. While the girl who dresses as a boy can do it in public and join the soccer team, the boy who dresses as a girl has to keep it secret, quiet, dark, and shameful.

If he wants a feather boa, he can't have one. If she wants a football, her dad will go out and buy it for her and teach her to throw it.

What gives? The answers are complex, deep, and very much based in our society. But how to explain that unfairness to the eight-year-old boy who wants pink sparkly nail polish?

When Henry Ford both paid his workers and priced the Model T so they could afford it, he was onto something. Surprise! The working people of America were and still are his market.

In the long run, something's gotta give. Either wages rise, or we spend less on consumer goods we never needed anyway. We NEED food, but we don't NEED iPods, iPhones, game systems, granite countertops, dinners out, or trips to Disneyworld.

I'll put my school age kid on national television to get booed by a whole stadium full of drunk, rowdy hockey fans! What a great idea! Of course, she'll understand why they're booing, and her feelings won't be hurt in the least!

Just for grins, can you imagine the outcry in the media if Obama put his daughters in that kind of situation?

I'm a mom, and I feel so sorry for that poor kid. My own son is still self-conscious about his freckles because some kid at school made fun of them once two years ago. I can't imagine my child in a whole stadium full of booing fans.

She needs her head examined.

Yup, you're right that people have been moving money around the world with letters of credit since medieval times. I recall an excellent National Geographic article a couple years back about the Hanseatic League of traders, sending goods and money around Europe in the 1500s and before. Actual physical gold was too heavy and too dangerous to transport around in a pack caravan with the products (grain, beer, wool, etc.). Makes about as much sense then as it would today to put actual gold (and round the clock guards) on a long-haul truck full of apples.

And yes. Mmmm. Hood River apples.

I wonder how this is all going to play out.

As the economy tanks and layoffs rise, more and more middle class people are going to find themselves hungry, foreclosed, unemployed, and uninsured. Interesting to predict social unrest based on all these factors at once.

Not only is our banking system broken, our "free market" health care system is also broken. Soon people are going to be demanding some kind of nationalized care, when they realize that a cancer diagnosis in the family means almost certain bankruptcy.