It is not just the overreaching Wall Street firms who are paying the price for those bad investments. Every American taxpayer is now on the hook for gigantic bailouts organized by the same investors in the federal government that had turned their back on governing the very investments at the origin of today’s fiscal crisis. Are you furious? You should be.

It gets worse! The huge miscalculations on Wall Street have added to a gigantic decline in the value of your 401(k) and IRA. Years of diligent saving have been eliminated, and you're frightened that your retirement savings plan will never recover fully. Predictions that the fallout in the consumer credit markets would be restricted to subprime loaning to borrowers with depleted credit scores proved terribly wrong. The fact is that lines of credit are being taken back in and home equity lines of credit or personal credit lines are being reversed across the board.