Help the Home Owner - that is it!

Bridge Loan to Nowhere!

In the movie Men in Black, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones team up to save the world by resolute preventive action. By contrast, America's real-life Men in Black--Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner--haven't done as well lately. Ever since that classical day of reckoning, the Ides of March 2008, when the terrifying specter of chain bankruptcy and currency collapse first loomed over lower Manhattan like an attacking spaceship because of Bear Stearns, it's been downhill.

Thomas Ferguson
A little over a week ago, the Men in Black made a fatal mistake. They allowed the aliens to vaporize the proud old firm of Lehman Brothers. Whole fleets of spaceships then immediately began attacking AIG, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, even Morgan Stanley and Goldman, Sachs. Now desperate, the Men in Black switched back to their old tactics and rescued AIG, but the damage had been done. The aliens had learned from Lehman and AIG how vulnerable Wall Street really was. Soon inter-bank markets everywhere in the world locked up. With financiers preferring treasuries that paid essentially nothing to every other asset in the world, huge runs started on money market funds.