Thanks, Wall Street

Boy, just when I thought I could see the end of the tunnel and look forward to more quality time in my Laser, Wall Street's greed has sucked much of the value out of the few eggs I have managed to collect in my little nest.

Worse yet, the Bush administration wants me to help rescue the outfits that got us into this mess in the first place as they played their high risk games in their sandbox with little supervision.

Unfortunately, we have to do something or they might drag everything down with them.

Rather than panic and start tacking on every lift, we need to take a deep breath and buy the economy some time to sort itself out.

Seems to me that if the real problem is the mortgages and other bad loans, then Congress ought to directly address the problem by decreeing fixed upper limits on interest rates for consumer debt for a period of 10 years.

Everyone who has a mortgage or credit card debt or a car loan with a rate hiher than the maximum would have their interest rates immediately adjusted to the gov't decreed rates.

Depending on the type of loan, the term could also be adjusted to suit the borrower's situation. For example, mortgages could be extended to 40 years in some cases.

The rates should be set reasonably low so the majority of folks saddled with unpayable debt can survive this crisis. Some won't, but they probably shouldn't have been given a loan in the first place

The financial sector will have to bear the brunt of lower revenues as they won't be able to gouge their customers. They also probably won't be able to afford their rediculous executive compensation packages anymore. The upside for them is that they will have a simplified, stable pricing structure on which to rebuild their ailing businesses.

This will give the system time to stabilize and for asset values to recover so I can retire someday and spend more time learning how to get down wind faster.