This is a classic. For decades any time a leadership candidate emerged who the international monetary community perceived as "hostile" in Latin America or Africa, they immediately sold their local currencies and divested themselves of local investments. Intended or not, the effect was that economies slipped any time the polls favoured leftists or others opposed to neo-liberal economic policies. So the Right got to argue the Left was bad at managing money even before taking office.

As far as I know this is a new concept for the U.S. In the past the country's sheer economic size meant it was insulated from such market fluctuations when compared to much smaller economies. The Third World's resource-based export economies were much more vulnerable than the U.S.

But in recent years have seen the global market grow much more integrated and so susceptible to wild swings. Meanwhile the U.S. has largely abandoned the diversified manufacturing economy that protected it.

I call this chickens coming home to roost. By it's sheer military and diplomatic might the U.S. forcibly subjected dozens of smaller countries into the economic system that's now screwing it. I'm sure you'll find very little sympathy for the U.S.'s economic woes south of the Rio Grande.

Let them all fail.

Or nationalize them.

Please, no more half-measures.

The top 5 financial institutions are now worth less than the bailout money they received.

Please, don't throw any more good money after bad. Either take them over, clean them up, and resell them at a later date, or let them fail.

...to be left to the likes of bankers and traders.

I know a lot of day traders. They brag that they've been gleefully gaming the system since the mid-90s, most with no education beyond a simple BA, laughing at us 9-5ers for our insistence on real, skills-based work.

Their ability (and need) to turn a profit has now officially overridden any accountability to their countries or the world. It's time this was stopped, before they ruin us all in a desperate attempt to finish "ahead" each day...

is to panic and feed the argument for it by making the problem worse? Yeah, that makes sense.

I feel so tempted to say we need a Wall Street holiday of about six months - a period in which trading simply halts until the system comes to its senses. But is there really any sense left in the system? Sense would direct investors to stay in for the long-term, but investors haven't been given much indication that our financial institutions see sense in that. Quick cash-ins seem to have been the true order of the day, at nearly all levels of doing business, and has finally been exposed as systemic cynicism, if not utter indifference, to the future of investors, of Wall Street, of Main Street, and of America.

With the inauguration of President Obama, has the final cash-out of Wall Street now begun? Will the new administration be tasked not with restoring the current financial system, but building an entirely new one from scratch? Perhaps we are enduring a financial Deluge, with the Earth being cleansed of a degenerate generation. If so, it's impossible not to say good riddance to bad rubbish. If that renders the future uncertain, at least it promises a future.

Or so we must hope.

Get rid of mark-to-market.

Time to roll up our sleeves and start building a good solid marriage, and oh, if you thought that good marriages were made up of the honeymoon followed by "happily ever after," you've seen one too many Disney bastardizations of much wiser fairy stories.

As in marriages, so in presidencies: you have to build your own "happily ever after," hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year. If we build solidly, based on regulations which require transparency, if we regulate existing practices, reserve the right to set up regulations for new investment vehicles (before they can be sold), require adequate cash reserves to back up insurance (no more unregulated and, therefore, imaginary "credit default swaps"), set maximum allowable interest rates and fees charged to customers and allow for sustainably moderate profit margins, along with placing limits on all the other ways stupid, greedy humans can game the system to their own benefit (and the detriment of everyone else) we can begin to build a new sort of "happily ever after."

Hereafter, let the only way to get rich be the invention and development of a product or idea which benefits all humanity in wonderful ways. No more should the richest people in our society be those who accumulate their wealth by playing games with money extracted from the rest of the economy and the people who do the actual work of society.

Wall street hates democrats, even though we always save their sorry asses.

There is a proposal to create a 'bad bank' to own all the toxic assets which are making the bankers wet their pants. Might work. Might not.

But lets put that bank inside a large Federal prison. And lets require the CEO and CFO plus the board of each rescued bank work at the 'bad bank' for a period of 4 years. And they don't get to go home at night.

GOOD. No one will lend money to anyone else until we all know who's got what. That doesn't happen until these banks come clean about their balance sheets. If anyone is still surprised that those sheets are filled with toxic debt, there's probably a job waiting for you at the George W. Bush Coloring Book Library.

Over the past few months, the Stock Market has not proven to be more than bi-polar, unstable profit-takers. How can anybody take them seriously when they swing back and forth so insanely? Up 500, down 300, up 400, down 700. What do they do? Cut open chickens every morning and examine the entrails to decide how the market should swing on any given day? So they don't like inaugurations? God knows what makes the Market move.

It time to get over our obsession with Stock Market numbers. At this point in time, it indicate nothing at all except a tendency to panic and see shadows around every corner. Certainly, we can find better ways than using these emotional, fickled traders as a popular measure of our economy.