Reluctantly, the fact of a serious recession has begun to be admitted in the USA.

How did we get here again?

Since Communism was an attempt to abolish the business cycle—it worked, too, by bringing on a permanent depression—I won't be foolish enough to say that recessions never have to happen. Or that the men of old were so wise that they never suffered from such problems, because they had some dillies (they called them panics) along the way.

No, none of that.

But what irks me, and makes me feel ill, is that anyone could see why this happened. Indeed, could see it happening, like that slow motion feeling you get as some precious object heads for the hard floor, and you can't quite catch it.

There is a very important word, fiduciary, which is not being used enough, or indeed understood well enough.

It refers to the responsibility of a steward to put the interests of his principal, the one who entrusted the assets in question, first, above his own.

There's a story in the Bible—the parable of the talents-that gives you an idea.

Brokers lied to get commissions, appraisers lied to get fees, and bribes, borrowers lied to get houses, hoping to flip them for a profit and everybody knew very well what was going on.

Remember the Savings and Loan collapse of the 80s? Anything sound familiar? Inadequate capital? Fraudulent practices? Remember Junk Bonds, the Boesky and Milken Show?

Wall Street is a casino, but can't we at least ask for a straight deck and honest dice?

The Markets should be trading stock, bonds and commodities, not inventing new and largely fictional instruments to bilk the public.

I had a very good view of the Savings and Loan debacle—as a Deputy Sheriff in Baltimore City, I had the financial district, and the papers (Lordy, such a lot of them!) to serve, and I also was duty bound to at least skim them.

I learned a lot—like how no matter what you do with your money, someone can steal it!

I also saw the utter contempt a lot of financial types have for humanity at large—poor you were, poor you are and poor you will remain is their motto—as well as how little pleasure they get from the sums they acquire.

Like kleptomaniacs, they acquire, hoard and never stop.

None of what they get is of much use to them, they have no time to savor their possessions, except when they take their obscenely wasteful vacations, and even then, they take work along.

What's to do?

Limit the types of financial instruments to a very few, so some form of monitoring can be done to insure the soundness of institutions and transactions, for a start. Prosecute and imprison those who commit fraud—imprison them for a very long time, life without parole, so that the risk of such practice is a lot bigger than the payoff.

Do you really think we got all of Boesky's money? He's out, you know. So are all the others, and none of them are starving. You can bet they have assets hidden away to gloat over, while many of the people they robbed have never recovered.

American's don't save—any wonder why?

The American economy is a house of cards—mainly credit cards—because it produces so little, and our money is going off to China like a turpentined cat.

Money lost in the Markets is gone forever, like bulk e-mails when you delete them. It never really existed. Wealth is what you can touch, and use.

And now, with the uncontrollable rise in energy prices, we face stagflation, a la 1970s.

It's going to be a bumpy ride. I wonder if we'll learn anything this time.

And we entrust our futures to these people?