And the world goes down the drain!

Okay so maybe it's just the US economy but in my narrow view, it might as well be the whole damn world! The US economy has been hard hit and in a downward spiral since as far back as 2000. The current administration has done little to stop the bleeding and in many ways has simply deepened the cuts. We have entered a multi-fronted war costing us roughly $720 million a day and seen the US dollar drop to record lows against all other major world currencies. In my lifetime, the Canadian exchange rate against the US dollar has hit rock bottom. It now only costs $0.98 Canadian to buy 1 US dollar where it use cost $1.60 Canadian for that same US dollar just 10 to 12 years ago! Thank you NAFTA and our countries failed leaders of late.

To add more fuel to the bonfire of our economy, today it was announced that for the first time since the Great Depression the Federal government is backing some $30 billion in loans to help finance a buyout of the once great Bear Stearns bank by JPMorgan Chase. That's right folks; the mighty Bear Stearns has fallen and won't get up. Wall Street has suffered the wrath of poor management and greedy bankers who preyed on the weak to line their pockets. Bear Stearns was the number one lender in the sub-prime mortgage market over the last decade and their willingness to lend money at embarrassingly high interest rates to anyone with a pulse has finally brought them down. The market fell out in sub-prime mortgages about a year ago and with no backup plan in place, Bear Stearns has gone down with it. This is what happens when you set people up to fail from the start with high interest rates and fees on top of their existing principle balances and allow them to finance 100% of that new home.

This is just one more nail in our collective coffin folks ... for anyone who does not have a credit score above 680 you'll be hard pressed to get credit for a few years at least. And for those of us who only dream of having a credit score above 600 ... break out that check book and the ole' green backs for the next 5 years at least, nobody's going to offer credit to that portion of the public for a long while. On the bright side, with all the new home foreclosures and bankruptcies the current economy is producing we'll have plenty of company in our little corner of No-Credit-Land!