I have been following the journey of our growing financial disaster in this country for years and especially over the last two or three weeks when everything has supposedly become critical and an emergency.

 

As a working person and now a retiree, I have watched with amazement as rules for borrowing money for a home loan has loosened. When I bought my home we almost couldn’t buy it because we had no credit and it took letters to explain why. Then in the mid 1990s anyone could get a loan, even people on welfare if it was verified they received a welfare check, even though welfare checks are not guaranteed income. I saw then that things had changed and we were on a slippery slope.

 

The bottom fell out of the housing market in 1994 right after we bought our home and we lost more than what we had paid down on it. Houses all around us were selling for ten of thousands less than just the year before. But we stayed put and gradually regained the value.

 

After awhile, housing prices skyrocketed and when we once couldn’t have sold our house for what we owed, suddenly it was worth hundreds of thousand more than we ever could imagine. At that point I knew our home was overvalued and as much as we would have loved a newer, bigger home, we couldn’t begin to afford one and we weren’t willing to go into a risky loan with an adjustable rate.

 

Why do I tell this story? Because I as an average citizen could see there was a growing problem and knew that the housing market was going to sink again to disastrous lows. What I didn’t see is what I didn’t know. There was mass manipulation of lending laws going on since the 1990s. There were massive amounts of money changing hands from the lending companies to the house and senate. There was fraud and corruption all over the place affecting the very people that should have been protected from this, the American people. All of this was going on at high levels and touted as good for Americans yet Americans had no idea how widespread the corruption was. But we are beginning to see what has been happening and very soon will pay for it.

 

My point in all of this is the foreign countries that are our allies. They are angry and their markets are hurting like ours. They have bought into our markets and they are upset. While they try to run their own countries properly, within a budget, our country has gone berserk and hurt everyone around us.

 

I expect more from our country. We are the United States of America, an example to the world of democracy, honesty and generosity. We have been the greatest country in the world and the world expects nothing less than the best from us. We are held to a higher standard and our leaders have become so greedy we have failed not only the citizens of this great country, but the world.

 

The leaders responsible for this fiasco need to be held accountable. If they were in office when this changed in the 1990s they need to be removed from office. If their hands are dirty in any way, remove them. If any of us as individuals would have done what our leaders have done we would be in prison. We have to clean house in our government and give us as well as the world a government to believe in again. We need to restore our integrity.