MarketWatch: You'll need this 'Noah's Ark' survival kit to stay afloat in 2009

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PAUL B. FARRELL
'Noah's Ark Survival Kit' for stormy 2009 seas
Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, along came Grinch Madoff

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch


LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- Historians say Ponzi schemes and con men are a fact of life. The best, the brightest and the richest can all become victims: from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1884 when the partners of his Wall Street firm left him penniless a year before he died of throat cancer to Bernard Madoff's investors, many whom became instantly penniless, just before Christmas and Hanukkah. Greed is a fact of life.

Thomas Friedman said it best in the N.Y. Times: "I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the 'legal' scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed.

The U.S. stock market has already absorbed the worst of the selling pressure this year and will start to recover in 2009 but any progress might be limited."What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds, which Moody's or Standard & Poor's rate AAA, and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn't a pyramid scheme, what is?"

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse along comes Madoff, the new poster boy for everything that's happened to the America's soul the past eight years: greed, arrogance, stupidity and megalomania.

OK, folks, you're right, maybe it is bad and it could get worse in 2009. But it really is the "season to be jolly." So indulge me. Maybe we can't erase the nightmare of the past eight years. But for a few moments join me, take a trip down memory lane to 2000 as I reminisce on what makes America strong and resilient in tough times. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Youll-need-Noahs-Ark-survival/story.aspx?guid=%7B22EC3A22%2D34B4%2D4C62%2D9E76%2DBA51735A179E%7D&dist=hplatest