I'm in the markets, and manage my own fledgling portfolio, and I'm not panicking just yet, and don't see any reason to do so. We will rebound sooner than most people think.

That we are in the middle of an election certainly doesn't help matters. There's uncertainty about who the next president will be. Once that's settled in a few weeks, I expect to start to see a confident consensus.

I will say that there definitely needs to be more government regulation of industry – specifically, in the financial sector. This should have always been the case, but, laissez-faire capitalism triumphed, and thus the trading of many rather complicated, and even unnecessary financial products went unchecked, helping to cause the predicament we find ourselves currently in. But, I think a lesson has been learned here, and we will see some change.

I am a registered Democrat and no fan of Bush. However, I'm pretty sure it takes more than a week or two to fix between 40 and 90 years of corruption/living on credit. And everyone (by that I mean the Federal Reserve, Congress and the G7) is convinced that Bush is not the one that is going to fix this, so let's stop going to that empty well, huh?

It's messed up. It's been messed up for a long time. We as a country have been actively trying to patch over this wound with a Band-Aid for a year now (remember your refund check and the lowered interest rates?), and now we need more drastic measures to (again) try to get the economy to respond. The stock market is not the indicator we are trying to shift, however. The stock market is a real-time indicator of consumer confidence, which I can't believe would be improved by the reading of your article.

If you are interested in regaining your 12% annual return on investment, I suggest you take an economics class. Remember them saying the stock market was unsustainable? This is what unsustainable looks like. Either we take the hit and reset the market now, or your parents/grandparents go hungry, or your children do. Who are you willing to sell out for your leased car and Starbucks coffee?

If you have an opinion on how you would like to spend the $700 billion dollars to heal the economy, I'd love to hear it. Or maybe we should just call our financial advisors and blame the government. It's all so “complicated and confusing,” you know?…

I'm inclined to cut Bernanke and Paulson a bit more slack. First of all, they have been a lot less ideological and more pragmatic than the typical Bush appointee. (In fact, it's painful to do, but to give Bush some credit, his lame-duck appointments like Gates are a huge improvement over the single-minded morons he appointed in the beginning of his Presidency. Of course, you really couldn't go much lower than he likes of Rumsfeld). It looks like there was a lot diplomacy going on to slip the bailout plan through a Congress being held hostage by the Republican wingnuts. On this you have to at least give some credit to Bernanke/Paulson for tacking to the middle, or spread some blame to the Democrats (depending on whether you see the bailout as bad or good).

Also, the weight of this crash is moving beyond any government's ability to stop — the best we can hope for is that intervention will break the fall somewhat. This baby was destined to go down, and the fact that we didn't plummet all the way in 2001-2 makes the current fall all the worse.

There's a lot of villainy to go around, but without a doubt Alan Greenspan deserves the gold, silver, and bronze medals. He's a Bush/Clinton/Bush man, so I'm afraid he's a bipartisan failure. What we can blame Greenspan for:

* Forestalling regulation of the derivatives market — the REAL cause of the current crisis
* Lobbying for and winning revision of the CPI that has understated inflation and given us a false sense of GDP growth
* Allowing the dot-com bubble to get out of control
* Failing to let the dot-com bust to correct itself naturally
* Overheating the housing market so he could leave office in the midst of a boom rather than in disgrace

Bernanke and Paulson took over a speeding bus that was already off the road and heading for a cliff.

to your topic here, this coalescence (coagulation?) of the world's banks and gov'ts to address is troubling if only for the new and larger scale of now direct damage that can be inflicted by mismanagement. politicians already got gamed or bought off by the street once.

we're getting set up for direct deposit.