Dating back to President Carter, the government has been coercing banks into making millions of toxic loans (they call them “subprime”), then backing these loans, making them appear to be reliable assets. So Wall Street and Main Street (predictably) treated them as reliable trustable assets. Worked fine until housing prices started to decline, then the whole house-of-cards came tumbling down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_policies_and_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis

Blaming Wall Street for a collapse like this is kind of like blaming trees for a forest fire.

Wall Street has PROVEN that they cannot operate in the shadows with little or no regulations. Their greed and incompetence can cause FAR more damage to society than some punk who sticks up a convenience store. Obviously, the WORST “bad guys” are on WALL STREET these days. They deserve to be called “banksters”. They’ve earned it.

The new Obama administration and Congress need to have some MAJOR overhauls of the regulations on Wall Street. Major new laws “with teeth” like they say. If Wall Street schemers break laws or regulations they get HUGE fines. CEOs and their cronies GO TO JAIL for a LONG period of time …. 20+ years. Wall Street “banksters” need to live with a lot more FEAR when they think about bending regulations, cooking the books, and doing other fraudulent things. They need to be thinking about JAIL TIME, being put in the poor house, etc.

The guy who wrote this column is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/opinion/23krugman.html?ref=opinion

“This is, first and foremost, a crisis brought on by A RUNAWAY FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it wasn’t because Americans “collectively” refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a great idea.”

I get your point, although Canada and Mexico are technically part of “America”. I probably should have said “US-based auto companies” instead of “American made”. Either way, we’re pretty much talking about the big three.

Now it’s my understanding (since I’ve read it many times) that the sale of a GM vehicle assembled in Canada or Mexico still benefits the USA much more than a Toyota vehicle assembled in the USA. If that is wrong, I would love to see some evidence to the contrary.

And even as a US citizen, it’s hard for me to blame GM for having plants in Canada and Mexico. The US government has created a business environment in the US (high taxes, destructive unions, legal hassles, etc) that is not competitive. I blame the US government more than I blame GM.