Dear Friend and Reader:
I SPENT SUNDAY evening with my selected family of friends, pulling together a little cacciatore, wine and a salad of dandelion greens. Even though this evening felt a lot like all our years of evenings together making and enjoying food, laughing and pushing each other’s buttons, this evening had an air of pensiveness and uncertainty.
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$10 bill/The US Treasury. Photo by Musely.
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Even thoughВ most of us at this dinner party have jobs and some of us are securely in retirement, there was a sense of unease as we broached the topic of what happened on Wall Street and at the White House.
There’s really no precedent for what’s going on — at least in our lifetimes. And none of us had a clue what to do next. It felt as though we could not bring ourselves to think that there may be a problem facing us so insurmountable that nothing we’ve done before could help us out now.В Was there something out there we’re not seeing that’s about to fall on our heads?
What does the financial crisis and breakdown of last week really mean for us? What is it that we can do? Or are we in no position to do anything at all? As Eric mentioned this morning, with the whole deal going down with Mercury retrograde, we’re in prime territory for skimming a little cream off of the hundreds of billions that are about to change hands.
To re-cap [as we covered in detail Friday, see Full Moon Over Wall Street], Wall Street giant Merrill Lynch avoided collapse through selling itself to Bank of America, while Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 after its big boss earned nearly half a billion dollars the past 15 years. The federal government has agreed to bail out major Wall Street company American Insurance Group, adding it to the list of companies which includes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as recipients of government largesse by rescue using taxpayer dollars.