Who's Done More Damage, Bernard Madoff or Alan Greenspan?

Exactly two years ago today, I received a phone call from hell. My financial adviser and close friend, with whom I had invested all of my family's life savings, called to tell me that overnight we had lost 95 percent of our net worth. It turned out that our life savings had been invested in a fund that had been handled by Bernard Madoff. Because we weren't direct investors (I didn't even know who Madoff was prior to his arrest), there was no hope of our ever recovering a penny.

Tragically, what happened to my family overnight is happening to many, many people today, only more slowly. It is one of the darkest nightmares of our times that so many people are losing their homes, their pensions, their jobs, their savings, and any semblance of financial security. The official unemployment rate is 9.8 percent, but if you include the underemployed (those who have part-time work but can't find a full-time job, though they need one), and add in also the huge numbers of unemployed people who have given up looking for work because they feel the search is hopeless, the figure rises to above 22 percent. There are already 19 million vacant homes in the country, with another 10 million foreclosures in the pipeline. The average household credit card debt is nearly $16,000. And the U.S. dollar, which has been the world's reserve currency for almost 100 years, is losing value and appears increasingly unstable.

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