Well, at least I can take comfort in the fact that you have flagrantly wasted a "great opportunity to increase you wealth through appreciation of property in this past decade."

[removes tongue from cheek]

All of this has happened, of course, because of deregulation -- not only does it create opportunities for all these financial manoeverings, it encourages gross consolidation of the banking industry in order to create an asset pool sufficient to take the best advantage of the opportunities offered by deregulation.

I mean Chase isn't a "bank", its a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan Corporation, and the function of "Chase Bank" isn't to make money doing "traditional" bank functions, but to provide the assets that can be leveraged to engage in a slew of non-bank related financial transactions.

The solution is reregulation of the banking industry, and the forced divestiture of banks from their parent corporations. Only then will "banks" actually be able to perform their traditional functions of contributing to the health of the economy by making smart decisions on loans to homeowners and businesses.