Is anybody dizzy yet? Maybe a better question is, is anybody not dizzy?

Awhile back I noted here at PFA that the FDIC has this year placed about 70 banks, mostly large regional retail banks (as opposed to investment banks like Bear Stearns) on an ‘endangered’ list. Today the specific large regional bank where I work as a part-time CSR was put on probation by the Federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a scary way of saying that the bank where I work is now under much tighter federal regulatory scrutiny than ever before. This in spite of raising $7 billion in additional capital last month. The last I looked today, our stock was down to $4.91 from a 51 week high of $54.71. I’m no high roller financier, but this strikes me as a bad thing. Even so, I was ready to reassure any and all customers who called with concerns, FDIC brochure in hand.

No one called with concerns.

I think the reason for that is that ordinary people have known for over a year that things in this country are incredibly screwed up economically. It is getting so that news can’t even get bad enough to freak anyone out anymore. Banks on the verge of failure? Yeah, big deal. Oil prices skyrocketing faster than the Space Shuttle? What else is new. Unemployment up to 5.5% In a pig’s eye; doesn’t even count the people who gave up looking months ago. And so on and so forth.

The extent of the damage done by the subprime mortgage crisis is unfortunately still playing out, and sadly, it’s playing out at the same time that global oil supplies are becoming tighter and tighter (some might even say at a time when global oil supplies are running out, but that’s a different post). A severe correction had to occur, with housing prices ridiculously inflated and mortgages being sold on insane terms and underwritten by people who were apparently taking large amounts of LSD.

The government is looking into the possibility that speculation in the commodities markets is helping to drive inflation in oil and food prices, but does anyone really believe that is the root cause of this year’s financial instability? Certainly speculators are moving into commodities now; there certainly isn’t any air left in the real estate bubble, so it is necessary to find other ways to create money out of nothing. I would ask why it has become so necessary to make money out of nothing?

Clearly, it’s because we no longer are making money off of something: cars, electronics, clothes, weapons, things, all going overseas where labor is cheap, costs are low, and regulation has too many syllables so it’s just left out of the language completely.

Personally, I believe that is the problem. The Federal Reserve can’t fix that part of this problem. The Fed can secretly loan money and broker deals, but that is only going to temporarily staunch the most severe bleeding. The root problem US markets are experiencing can only be fixed through the kind of intervention Franklin D. Roosevelt championed after the Great Depression.

There, I said it.

We need to get people back to work, not just send them $300 checks on borrowed money. We need to repair our crumbling infrastructure and we have lots of unemployed people who would be more than willing to do it to feed their families. We need to attract green industry to this country and start to lead the world by example in this area. We could be manufacturing electric cars right now and people would buy them faster than we could pump them out. Are we doing this? No of course not. We’re moving our auto industry overseas and selling them our badly-made, expensive-to-run gasoline powered cars.

The irony of it all for me is that last month I actually sold half a million dollars in bank products, which means if I still have my job at the end of June I’ll actually get some decent commission.

Oh yeah, I’m dizzy. In fact, I’m starting to feel a little nauseous.

How about you?