What a load of .............. It isn't hard to modify mortgages or change them. The government has changed the rules by bailing out the banks and giving the "biggest and brightest" billions of dollars so they wouldn't have to pay for their terrible forecasting. The banks are underwater much more than any homeowner and government basically owns the banks. All they have to do is get new appraisals with a few of the billions they are wasting and tell the banks to reduce the loans. The longer they drag this out the more difficult it will be as prices continue to fall and banks fail more rapidly. Cut the crap about this being delicate and complicated and quit pandering to the people who have run the system into the ground and move on. It is clear the banks are still in it for themselves and can't get themselves out of this mess or they would be pillaging anyone they could for more profit. I am all for free market and taking pain as an investors but when government bails out banks there is no such thing as free market. It is a completely joke when the treasury secretary says they don't want to nationalize the banks. We give them billions and then let them squander it just like they did with their billions of profits from the previous years and expect things to change. It is a complete joke and I hope the American people are realizing that it is not as complicated as Wall street and the government pretends it to be in order to keep us all from realizing we all just go "pants" by the banking and financial system.

Mark to Market chatter

Congress is talking about changing Mark to Market rules for the banking system. (mark to market means that assets are given the same value as other similar assets.) In today's market their are billions of dollars of bank assets that no one wants to buy at any price. There is no way to price these assets any anything much over zero. The alternative to Mark to Market is mark to model. The bank would be allowed to speculate as to the current and future value of a mortgage or an asset based on their opinion or estimation of the quality of the borrower or the asset.

The mark to model allows banks and bankers to get away with pushing potential losses out to future years and in turn can make current earnings look far better then they appear to be using Mark-to-market. For years banks were able to cloud their true earnings or true value of assets by using mark to model. The congress is only talking about mark to model again because they see no way out of the financial crisis if they accurately price the current bank assets. Imagine you wanted to sell your house and decided that it would be worth 100,000 more in 10 years and then expected to be paid that price today. Mark to model is similar to this and is nosensical. It will be the biggest scam of the American tax payer if the government guarantees or buy these toxic assets held by banks at any other price than current value.

Wall Street Bonuses

Yes of course wall street couldn’t survive without the biggest and brightest minds who have done so well the past few years. Who cares if these “geniuses” leave? Obviously they massive bonus pay has not deterred executives from running their companies into the ground or from helping drive the economy off a cliff. How could we live with out them?