Wall Street Will Make Money - $65 Cans of Coke

Stocks jump a day after biggest sell-off in years was the headline on an an MSNBC article mid-day Tuesday 9/30/08.

You see, it really does matter to Wall Street whether the bailout legislation gets passed or not. The only thing the politicians have done is scare main street. Likely many old folks called their broker yesterday and told that broker to get out of the market. It is likely those old folks are much worse off today than they were yesterday.

But, the folks on Wall Street made money today. They didn't make money back for those old folks. They did make money for more sophisticated folks. The did make money for themselves. But, the President, the President's advisors and Congress scared the people on main street. They did this all to protect the little shell game banks play among themselves - borrowing among themselves.

We deserve better. We The People need to vote out all the Congress members that voted for the bailout. We deserve better.

Legislation is however needed. We need legislation that will prevent the continued existence of companies "too big to fail". We need to establish legislation immediately to prevent future companies from going hat in hand to the Treasury secretary and saying we need help. We need all companies to understand that they play by the rules of everyone else in our capitalistic society.

We further need legislation that directs the President to create watch lists of companies considered "too big to fail". As soon as a single company goes on that list, they should have but a few months to fix the problem before Congress gets to fix the problem for them. You only need to look at the story of Ma Bell (former, not current) to see the benefit of a breakup. Competition is GOOD!

In the banking industry you can just keep getting bigger and as you do so you begin to dictate terms that others follow. Look at the situation of $30, $35 or more dollar bounce check charges. These charges occur very often simply because someone buys a dollar bottle of water without realizing their balance is too low. Every bank I've used refuses to provide me the option of rejecting acceptance of an overdraft. It is part of their business plan to get paid those overdraft fees. Within the last two months I had to pay over $130 for two cans of Coke. I mean, a Coke is good now and then, but a Coke is not worth $65 a can!

If there was competition in the banking industry, consumers could easily find a bank that would allow them the option of specifying handling over overdrafts. I would immediately change to that bank and request rejection of any purchase I tried to make if insufficient funds were in my bank account.

In summary, we need legislation that costs main street nothing. We need legislation that causes companies not to get "too big to fail" and we need legislation that causes competition to return to the banking industry. Competition is good for our capitalistic system. We need it now more than ever.