Thoughts

I have a friend who was an economics major in college. Now, granted he is not an economist or financial planner or stock broker right now, but he does keep up to date on the trends.

He was against the bailout plan because he felt it was unfair for the taxpayers to pay for the banks and other financial institution's mistakes. He figured the system had become broken and the best thing to do was to let many banks fail, even though it would be an extremely painful process. Personally, I didn't quite see it that way. I thought that would be too drastic a move.

But the bottom line is this: We were both talking about the Great Depression and how it is a very real possibility today. Back then, since the "run on the bank" was happening everywhere, the banks simply closed their doors. These events happened very quickly, much the same way events are happening very quickly today.

I'm not trying to alarm anybody. But what's going to happens when our credit, debit and ATM cards are simply pieces of plastic that do nothing else? And what happens when our stock certificates and our bank statements are nothing more than pieces of paper?

How scary a time is this?