PutinToon 39 - Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a MILLION or Two?

HUCK FINN COMMENTS: Run for the cover. The economy is going to get worse.

There are areas of danger, beyond risky mortgages, emerging in the global credit crunch, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “New Hitches in Market May Widen Credit Woes" by Liz Rappaport, Carrick Mellenkamp and Karen Richardson. The mortgage market has so far cost banks and investors more than $100 billion.

I’m a fairly educated, simple guy, but I realize that if I don’t understand something on Wall Street, then it's:

(a) a bunch of crap
(b) designed to make someone a lot of money at the great expense of others
(c) designed to control the masses

When I read the WSJ article, and realized I didn’t understand half of the Wall Street mumbo jumbo. The problem is Wall Street 'suits' keep inventing new fancy financial instruments designed to reduce the risk in the markets, only for to them operate like a house of cards. We’ve seen it before. They use sophisticated language and terms so we won't understand it, in an attempt to appear more important and smarter than they are.

Sophisticated financial instruments aren't new. The Dutch were doing derivatives in the 1700s. They developed extremely sophisticated financial instruments to reduce risk, even without the aid of the computer. What we have today is a bunch of Wall Street types practicing 'financial voodoo'. And when the walls crumble

down, everyone wonders what happened. This is were we are today.

The market can turn on you so fast, no wonder Wall Street uses the term 'Bulls and Bears'. Wall Street sounds like a bunch of sailors. During a recent Goldman Sachs conference, G. Kennedy Thompson, Chairman and CEO of Wachovia Corp., told investors that the bank and its competitors are facing  a "big headwind.” (I thought he was going to start cussing like a sailor.)

What the hell does 'big headwind' mean? America's becoming Ameritanic^TM because of high oil prices and the incredible cost of the Iraq War.

36% of Americans aren't living in a bubble, according to a GallupPoll. They know that It’s the Recession, Stupid ^TM. I wish my banker would admit it.

We need to get off the Ameritanic as quickly as possible by:

(a) cutting our budgets
(b) becoming more energy efficient
(c) voting in a president who'll going to take us out of Iraq. We’ve got plenty of wars to fight at home.

If you really want to get scared, another picker-upper-lifter article in WSJ says the subprime market fiasco in the U.S. is about to pull the U.K. into recession as well, “Credit Crunch Pounds U.K. Economy.”

$2.4 trillion flowed in and out of the U.K. in 2006, making London a financial Mecca equal to New York. The financial sector accounts for more than one fifth of all U.K. jobs, compared to only 6% of  U.S. jobs, and contributed to one quarter of the U.K. economic output in the last five years.  Ameritanic has landed in America and now it's headed toward Europe.

Follow my simple logic:

America, currently in recession, enables Ameritanic to leave the New York harbor
==> Ameritanic lands in the U.K. and the Brits go into recession
==> Financial shuffling of paper from one part of the world to the next slows to a crawl
==> The world goes into recession (except Saudi Arabia and Dubai, where they're busy building super galactic construction projects from profits of high oil prices to American consumers)
==>  Global recession leads to mass immigration into Middle East

The one benefit from the financial crisis is that less paper is shuffled around the world, saving trees and making the planet greener.

America, and especially the Middle Class is FORECLOSED.

I wish the aliens who landed in Stephenville, Texas would abduct me and take me from all of the financial and political shenanigans.

At the rate America is heading, how’s George W. Bush going to pay the White House mortgage?

Based on George W. Bush's $3.1 trillion budget, the U.S. will assume an additional $400 billion in debt. Hey, what’s a few billion here or there? Or a few hundred billion? It's just paper.

What would Putin do? How would he get America out of recession? Da, that is the question. And that leads me to one other question:

Hey Buddy, can you spare a million or two so I can pay off some of my national debt and keep the White House from foreclosure?

Thank you for your consideration.

Huck Finn, Chairman, The Amerikan Party

"Smart-Ass Politics for Smart People.” ^TM