What you have successfully acomplished though, is to inspire people from our lowly perches to re-examine the Obama approach through the lens of preventing, or minimizing economic calamity.

The clock is ticking. Obama owns a vast well of goodwill. Many of us are distrubed by the seeming overt favoritism and hyper extraordinary government largess towards the banks, and Goldman Sach particularly, – but we are willing to afford the Obama government a bit more time to sort through this horrorshow and calamitous economic crisis we all recognize Obama inherited from the bushgov.

Let us hope that Obama’s methodical approach truly does have the best interests of the American people, and not Goldman Sachs, or the predatorclass swindlers and thieves on Wall Street at heart.

Yet there is no such thing as excusing or cloaking crimes. If these pericious and perfidious policies exist, – then effectively – there is no law. And in a world where there in no law, – there is no law for anyone predators.

And I agree with you that we are facing a serious crisis of ethics in business today. What has me stunned is the depth of it.

Can anyone tell me, with all these abundant brilliant suggestions, what real, structural, change has been adopted? …. besides maybe shuttering yet more American manufacturing capacity.

The kind of profit that does not rely on cash equivalents, future tax savings, over valued good will or level three assets. There has been far too much manipulation in methods of accounting, mark to model, and off the books vehicles.

Look to FASB and cheap credit as the source.

Currently, aside from a limited commodity holding, I am out of the market. I simply cannot trust the phony balance sheets and the filings based on them. It is a difficult and time-consuming task to tell whether a company is solid. It may in fact be impossible.

Trust in honest corporate accounting and reporting is gone. I doubt that I am alone in my opinions.

Thad

As an economic officer in the Foreign Service (now retired), I found it baffling that our U.S. Treasury takes the leading role on setting economic policy in each Administration. Treasury prefers to communicate little with other U.S. agencies. It defers to the “market,” meaning that U.S. corporations and lobby groups have an enormous impact on steering economic policy within agencies like State, Commerce and USTR — which divide among themselves parts of the economic policy process. Confusion and cross purposes are common. Too few from outside government understand that Treasury’s misguided leadership plays a major role in our lack of an effective industrial policy. We simply have none. We need a “Department of the Economy” that encompasses trade and investment policies, which can wrest industrial policy from Treasury’s neglect. All the major economic powers competing with the U.S. (Japan, Germany, China, France) depend on an astute Ministry of the Economy to guide their trade and investment policies in a manner that promotes their industry’s exports and technology advantage.

One of Opel’s reasons for success, and you don’t mention it, is that there IS a “cash for clunkers” program currently happening in Germany. Senator Feinstein didn’t come up with this on her own. And $4500 towards the purchace price of a new car isn’t going to motivate people like me at @ $2.50/gallon. If the government agrees with my assesmet, and they tax petroleum even more, I have the option of walking and mass transit. I can simply park my car somewhere, thake the plates and registration stickers and let the government deal with it. (I understand many can’t – but $4500 in a tax break versus 2 or 3 thousand in repairs makes many a vehicle roadworthy with no monthly payments)

The only approach I see the administration doing is trying to ignight the fires from days gone by…redit to finance credit leveraged with even more credit. You would think by now we could conclude this model is unsustainable. Apparently, by both the past administration and the current, the Goldman Sachs executives (Paulson and Geithner) think with enough of a credit expantion, good times will roll again and we’ll all be buying houses and cars galore as long as the credit markets are unfrozen. Funny though, no mention of jobs!

The administration thinks the root cause of the economic collapse that is underway is the failure of the credit markets and if banks simply lent money, the collapse would end. Sadly, they cannot see that more credit = more debt. If debt can’t be paid back, why issue more credit? Nobody wants to answer that. Why?

The US economic system is DEPENDANT on prices going up. Mode debt, more credit, pay raises for politicians and municipal unions. The math breaks apart when prices go down. When stores and people cloes down and/or lose jobs, municipal funding fails. Politicians can mandate a raise, but from who? On the backs of a smaller taxpayer base? Local businesses? They’ll quit as well. And the unemployed who remain will drain the social services system.

The Japanese can’t sell cars here and neither can GM, Ford or Chrysler. The demand is not there because unemployment continues at 600k+ per month, and continually revised even worse. We have shipped our manufacturing to China, our IT to India and cut domestic jobs month after month because it is an immediate high; akin to a financial crackhead getting one last high on the books…never to be seen again..but doing it again and again for no real gain. Only pain and loss.

The ONLY way out of this mess is let the chips fall where they may. If Godman Sachs/JP Morgan and others fold, then the former Masters of the Universe need to be tossed into the ash heap of history. Not propped up by fewer and fewer employed American taxpayers.

Jimmy