Leo and I went to the Top of the Hub yesterday for lunch and to see what exactly it was the sea gulls saw. Well, lemme tell ya that yes on a clear day you can see over the edge.

I guess this is what the captains of industry are grasping at on a regular basis when they zip up to their elite aeries around the world in order to hedge their bets with funds provided by the suckers below, namely the US taxpayers and all the other poor slobs from Reykjavik to Beijing who watched their supposed investments go flying out the window.

This idea afloat that the talent pool of finance must receive their unjust rewards, code name "bonuses," in order to entice them to stay on or the business world will implode is shear genius on behalf of the political spin doctors. The only problem is, witch doctors are not supposed to be given credence or credit.

World markets have already imploded or to mix more metaphors, the vampires have already sucked us dry. If AIG feels compelled to honor their contractual obligation to the losers on their payroll, fine let the company make a profit and then they will have their thirty pieces of silver to distribute as they see fit.   

The "real" world of high finance deals out plastic money like playing cards on the Black Jack table. Sooooo what the hey, gimme a house to fill up too! And yes we all stood in line to get our mortgages pumped up beyond a reasonable doubt, sorta like taking financial steroids. After all Manhattan was originally purchased with a bunch of beads so why not buy a Mac mansion with a hand full of jelly beans?

It seems to me that the US of A is the second largest Ponzi schemer after Bernie Medoff. We sold toxic mortgages to eager investors around the globe, how were they to know that equity had been translated into cheap confection?  Bernie was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a juggling act that really did take talent but like the Naked Emperor of fable, Bernie had nothing to juggle except his “talent” and neither did the executives at AIG. So Bernie goes to the slammer, but the boy’s from AIG get more blood from the stone, a trick I thought every one could see through, silly me, not unless you have x-ray vision.