Fear and Greed or Hope and Seriousness. Today's the day.

Well, we just dipped 700+ points, faster than a feather tied to an anvil, in increments of 10 and 15 and 20.

The folks who've stood on their soapbox for years now--the conservatives, of both parties--bemoaning awful intrusions on the free market are now stuck. The laissez faire free market got us here, and now, as paid-for shills of psychedelic finance, they have no answers. None. Nada. Bupkis.

The cruel joke is a joke, one my older brother told me years ago in the midst of the last Gekko-like, junk-finance age gripping London as in New York: What happened to all the hippies? They're stockbrokers too, they just don't wear underwear.

"If it feels good, do it." It fits the times now as it did then. Remember that, and today, the next time someone makes a joke about hippies. Maybe ask them if it's cheaper for an unemployed investment banker to fill up a Range Rover or a Microbus?

On to today's business, the worst DOW point drop in US history. Proof that railing against evolution is a niche concern compared to the many who want to deny fiscal gravity. And, oh joy, my congressman, Eric Cantor, wants to cry that Nancy Pelosi hurt his feelings after his party's obtuseness and obstructionism today; called him out on the unhappy ending of his ideology's fairy tale. Impossible, I know, Eric, but grow up.

The bottom line, congresspeople, is you're screwed if you do, and we're screwed if you don't.

The bottom line, voters for said congress-people, is that the fairy tales reanimated since Reagan are now a box. It finds you worried about payroll and receivables and yet also makes you send calls and emails to Washington DC, 100 to 1 against calming the world's markets. The antidote, thanks to laissez faire procrastination, is anti- everything that so many supposedly "stand for." Well, there's nothing laissez faire nor Invisible Hand about the need for a heart needle or a crash cart and some paddles.

No, it's not fair that taxpayers are gonna have to be the grownups and bail Junior and Cissy Smitherington-Farqhuar out of jail. You didn't ask for this, but you ordained it.

As others much smarter than me are coming to realize, this is a crisis of a now non-operational ideology more than one of finance. The Freeze of Credit is a consequence of this failure, not cause. Trust is dead. And Greed is the fickle new bastard-son King.

Many are saying they can't "aid and abet American Socialism." Newsflash: You've been doing that for years. When you allow private sectors and their industry lobbyists to write laws in their profitable favor, such as the repeal, with Gramm-Leach-Bliley, of major solvency safeguards in Glass Steagall--itself a result of the hard lessons of 1929, you are explitly socializing risk--laying bare a swath of the economy to unfettered myopia and mugging called the Crisis of the Commons.

And when you firewall consumers/voters from remedies for their own small financial crises--either from foolishness or, far more statisitically likely, from bankruptcy due to crushing catastrophic healthcare debt--well, what you do there is a weirder, crueler perverse and un-American version of Socialism called Corporatism. The fruits of their PowerPoints™ and K Street working lunches? The 2005 Bankrupcty Bill, more accurately labelled the Financial Services Foolishness and Greed Do-over Act.

Voting for that pre-emptive bailout bill were 229 Republicans and 73 Democrats. Opposing were 125 Democrats and one independent, Vermont's Bernard Sanders. Ironic that the Congress' one socialist voted against a unique form of Corporate Socialism. Maybe he wasn't paying attention.

That Act was explicitly written NOT because Wall Street or Hartford was stupid. On the contrary, they knew exactly how far they were leaning over the edge on their exposure and risk-models. And they wanted a safety net for the crap--dodgy mortgages, credit cards, auto loans--they knew they were peddling to keep their quarterly numbers botox-pretty. That was Phase One. Paulson's and Bernanke's POS cash-grab first offering last week was Phase Two.

They knew today was very likely coming, and they gambled that since nobody knew for sure--that since no one could offer dead solid perfect proof trhat derivative WEREN'T magic--they'd keep moving forward with their fantastical Unicornomics. They'd dig their spurs in and shout "What's in your wallet?" or "Better call DiTech!"



But the CGI special effects in those crap commercials isn't the only technological advance. The creep of IT also brought "super-genius" powers of "knowing things." A big-shot financial services executive once described it to me as, "the ability to see around corners!" "Yes," I asked, "but can you bend light?" He didn't get my sarcasm. "Soon!" he said, "Soon!" he said.

It's not news to many, I'm sure, that this silicon-augmented power tends to make you at first awed, then confident, then embarrassingly, arrogantly ignorant of your vulnerability. They knew that their vast databases and instantaneous tracking thanks to tech advances meant they could "monitor" known iffy credit risks at point-of-purchase right up to the line of "yes" or "no" on a half tank of gas or a full one. That these risks (some call them people) were living paycheck to paycheck in an increasingly shock-prone economy was 'backstopped' by the program "to reduce the downside."

And there was Joe Dokes, taunted to "Go for it!" by ads made by guys like me. Get that HELOC or 3rd refi -- shop till you drop and to Flip This House! The fees, the fine print, the floating nebulous and changeable rules of their contract with us were all designed to render the "customer" into a commodity to be squeezed, harvested, pandered-to. Until it wasn't useful to do so anymore. It's a weird existence living in the parallel universe of pretend public care (Customer Advocacy™) and jeering private disdain.

Except now, the disdain is leaking out.

These are folks--parallel in their desires to Wall Street's appetites, much more limited in their means--that suddenly Big C conservatives are calling crass, greedy, irresponsible consumers. They just followed the program. Told to "go shopping," post 9-11, they're "un-American" dolts today. Or, and this gets my viens popping, Talk Radio clowns are now suddenly trying to float the minority and low income beneficiaries of Community Reinvestment Act loans as the cause of Fannie and Freddie's downfall, and the broader market's collapse. That talk-radio meme, the machine gun nature of pre-emptive blame spraying is tear-inducing and rampage-making, and I can't decide which has more general utility.

Back to today, to the sudden crisis of philosophy due to a failure of that philosophy. A vote failed, the market tanked. It clawed back, then it tanked some more. Maybe that will shock some out of their pantomime. Somehow I think that those who weren't so concerned in 2005 about the solvency and resilience of the average family's economy will betray their Harlequin Romance view of Adam Smith to prop up the American Exceptionalism™ of our wheezing National Economy.

In the end, philosophy be damned. The vote will be made in favor of unfreezing liquidity, because Arthur Jensen wants it.