How quickly the reality of "bail out nation" changed those thoughts.

• Since then, however, the Fed has cut interest rates seven times. It has helped to orchestrate the bailout of Bear Stearns, backed up by a $28.2 billion loan. And last month the Fed stood behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America’s two troubled mortgage giants.
• The chief conundrum posed by the coincidence of the credit crunch and the inflation crisis has been whether to cut interest rates to spur flagging growth or to raise them to keep a lid on rising prices. This is generally treated as a technical question. It is as much a philosophical one. Should greedy bankers and imprudent borrowers be bailed out for their excesses in order to safeguard short-term prosperity or should they be punished in order that they learn the error of their ways and behave more prudently in the future?

For me it just makes me a bit physically ill to watch this all play out. But I guess the idea is to get it to a point that you become numb to it all. And we can look back in a few years and say "well it was all necessary". And much like after the Enron/Worldcom era - we'll forget the lessons, and allow those with the deepest pockets and biggest political contributions relax the regulatory environment again - slowly but surely - and we'll repeat this "once in a lifetime event" with something new (although I cannot imagine how they will top this one) sometime in the 2015-2017 time frame. And repeat this all over again. With your money. Because the foxes do run the hen house in this country. And they get the money from the sheep. It's quite the farm.