July 16, 2008 9:52 AM

Mr. Bush Did Not Reassure Me Yesterday

Anyone happen to actually listen to Mr. Bush try to calm our fears about the ongoing crumbling of the U.S. financial markets? He struck me as someone who neither understood nor really cared about the problem. There will be more bank failures and there will be more Federal intervention in financial organizations deemed too big to fail.

Honestly, I never thought I would feel sorry for the chairman of the Federal Reserve or the Secretary of the Treasury. By all accounts, Bernanke and Paulson are generally thoughtful people, and they have been dealt a clean up job that is impossible. We are now facing payback time for a decade of radical financial market deregulation, the unwillingness of the Fed to regulate predatory lending, the ability of Enron and its cousins to buy changes in rules at the SEC and the CFTC via former Republican Senator Phil Gramm. Literally billions of dollars of income and profit have been gained through such moves, almost entirely going to the top 1% of the income chart. That money is gone. And now we are all going to pay. Buckle your seat belts and make sure your money is FDIC insured - there is more bad news to come.