on CNBC and the traders on Fast Money have been telling me how we're all in this financial crisis together.  Trust me, guys, I get it but I do still have a few questions: Does this mean Hank Paulson will be writing me into his will?  When do I start vacationing in the Hamptions?  Will my black American Express card arrive this week or next?

While I have no doubt (okay, I do have a couple of small doubts but for the sake of this post...) that we are all on this sinking ship called the American Financial System, we are assembled together on the deck only because it's going down fast and the folks in first class need some of the passengers in steerage to row the lifeboats.  Were it possible for all the residents of Wall Street to be airlifted off and leave those of us on Main Street to turn blue and float away, they would.  (Well, maybe Kate Winslet would stay with us and the orchestra, the orchestra always stays.) 

Now as for myself, well, I don't have much to lose and I did in some small way steer us toward the iceberg and - like it or not - I'm not the only one.  If you bought a car you couldn't afford, amassed credit card bills buying Angus burgers at McDonald's and only paid the interest, if you bought a house on a pay option ARM that's headed into foreclosure, then you're part of the problem, too.  Unfortunately, there are a great many people who didn't run investment banks and lever them 30 to 1 or buy houses they couldn't afford with little or no down payment (just for the record I put 40% down on mine and still lost it), who have seen their house values fall and their part of our (soon to be) $1.3 trillion debt rise.  My mother, some of my friends, my son (and most likely my grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren, you get the idea) all of whom live within their means and pay their bills on time have been sucked into the financial whirlpool.  (And, yes, all of my descendents will live within their means and pay their bills on time.)

Who's to blame, the people on Wall Street who concocted these exotic mortgages and then packaged them up and sold them off at thirty times the value of the underlying assets?  The home buyers who failed to read and/or understand the mortgage documents they were signing?  I think there's blame enough to go around and I'm willing to take my part but I sure do wish the folks explaining the issues to me would stop talking slowly and speaking in words of one syllable when they do the explaining.  While most of us may not be as financially sophisticated as Wall Street I-bankers (and that includes most of the Senate and the Congress), I don't think that means we're any dumber.  Friday on Bloomberg Ted Ryan of the U. S. Treasury said we should just give "smart people the ability to look at this, to figure out the alternatives." Well, gee, Ted aren't the smartest guys in the room the ones who dreamed up these complex derivative instruments?  And aren't the travelling duo of Hank and Ben the guys who waited until we ht the iceberg to tell us we were off course? 

The other day - running between committee meetings - some elected official remarked that he thought Wall Street owed Main Street an apology.  No need of one for me just let me know which door mat the keys to the Bentley are under, my son would like to take it out for a spin.  'Cause, hey, you know, we're all in this together.