Burning Down the House

I went to college in the early 80s. The Talking Heads were then a popular band; I attended house parties on campus (don't tell my parents!) where a packed wall-to-wall roomful of people swayed, with a barley pop in hand, to Take Me to the River, and a couple years later to Burning Down the House.

[We also sang Rick James' Super Freak, but that's another story. If you aren't familiar with The Talking Heads or Rick James, you skipped the late 70s to early 80s and haven't lived, my friend.]

Flash forward 25 years. Today's news stated that food manufacturers will raise prices by 20 to 25% by the end of this year. There could also be a cut across the board to state's funding by the Feds of up to 34%. Gosh, is that all? No, really, tell me the bad news.
Early this evening while listening to Market Place (NPR), I thought it ironic that the piece played at the end of the story was Burning Down the House. After all, IndyMac bank has failed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those adoring GSE's (government-sponsored entities) of the mortgage world, have not failed (they say) but the bearded Ben Bernanke, the King Bee of the Federal Reserve Board, has pledged for the Fed to give Fannie and Freddie trillions of dollars if needed so they'll have adequate reserves. Trillions with a capital T. Give probably isn't the right word, but just where are the dollar bills coming from that generous Ben intends to lend? From you and I? From hot off the printing press, or both?

Burning down the house, indeed.

[Some of you know that in a previous life I was a Mortgage Broker, they have 12 Step programs for people like me. Thankfully, it seldom comes up in my current life, but when it does, I always state that I was ethical. Please forget my former job as I try to do. The recent news from the mortgage world scares me. No, it horrifies me. I never could have predicted a Nightmare of such epic proportion when I left the business two years ago.]
[Photo courtesy of Creative Commons.]