And the US Treasury is certainly caught between the scylla and charybdis of tax-payers' money and the state of economy. If they don't help the biggies, then the after-effects will be disturbingly widespread. And if it does, then it's certainly taxpayers money going down the drain.
And what is hurting the US citizens currently is that their money is simply saving the asses of those rapacious financial chiefs who should actually be publicly lynched. They saw it coming. They all did. And yet, inspite of (or perhaps because of) their deep understanding of the markets, they kept quiet, all the while shouting out slogans such as "we will ride the storm, we have done it before". True, they had definitely survived tsunamis earlier, but this one was different. This one was the result of all dangerous explosives put together underneath a fuel tank. There were ego-boosting cries of "American dream" by Mr. Greenspan, resulting in 1% FRR and loans handed out of trucks and trailers. There were the regulators who just looked the other way when the shit was inching it's way up to the fan, there were rating agencies who were doling out AAAs faster than AAA batteries, there were real estate players who were making everyone believe that when it came to house prices, Mr. Newton was wrong, and then there was greed, the desire to make more and more money at clearly a huge cost to those who had no idea what trap they were getting into...
Even then, as they say, hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things.
And so everybody is hoping that the bottom is reached (but we know it hasn't). Everyone is hoping that the cancer doesn't spread any further. Everyone is hoping that the falling bricks on the wall street find their way back...
