#885 Pumperdumper

Currently Washington and Wall Street are playing the blame game. How did the economy go in the tank? Bad lending? Bad borrowing? Crazy derivatives of bad loans that should never have been made to people who should never have applied for them?
Was it balloon payments? Personally, I’ve never let myself buy a balloon I couldn’t afford. The ones with helium can get over your head in no time.
But still, many of these questionable practices have been going on for decades—easy loaning Freddie and Fannie, hyper-leveraging Wall Streeters, poor people charging what they couldn’t afford.
It all depended on an extremely delicate balance of greed, just in time payments, and short-term loans. Anything could have tipped the balance.
And then came the game changer. I call it the great pumperdumper. Gas went up to 4 bucks a gallon.
When we got dumped on at the pump, our entire economy came crashing down. A credit-strapped nation already overspent, suddenly asked to spend an extra 30 bucks a week to get to and from work. Or more if they had an old car or a giant SUV. Then food prices went up, thanks to the extra cost of transporting everything, and corn ethanol crimping the crops. Just then, the adjustable rate mortgages kicked in. Did I mention a war and a federal deficit driving the interest rates up on those ARMs?
Goodbye American economy.
Any one of those things taken singly might have been absorbed. But the exploding effects of high priced fuel burned the pocketbooks of countless families on the edge.
Perhaps the worst is over. Gas prices are back to 2.45 a gallon. People can drive to work cheaply again. Unfortunately, many people don’t have jobs to drive to. A lot of businesses bit the big one in the crunch. More worrisome, there’s a huge mass of bewildered and angry unemployed mortgage brokers, investment counselors and bankers.
Poor folk are used to dealing with more downs than ups. I’m worried about the acute desperation of these first time unemployed.
I hope we don’t have white collar riots.
But hey, at least they’ll have cheap gas to make Molotov cocktails.
America, ya gotta love it.