My doorbell rang just moments ago, and I was greeted by a fellow in a tie and slacks.

I am used to seeing clipboard toting environmentalists, civil libertarians, tax activists and lay evangelists. I am used to seeing the dish company, the cable company, the paper boy, landscapers, siding, window, and roofing contractors. Today, however, was a first. He was not a Watkins, Fuller Brush or encyclopedia salesman. He wanted me to invest.

According to his business card and literature, this guy was a local "Financial Advisor" for one of the largest investment banks and brokerage houses left in the United States. Perhaps, the very biggest, but I will protect his anonymity and save his pride. While CNBC rolled out the news of the Wall Street Crash in our living room, this fellow queried me about my investment strategies.

I hope he didn't feel bad, because my girlfriend could not help laughing in the background at the irony of it all. He is a neighborhood guy with a family and he is so very screwed. A visit by a desperate man who was not looking for pop bottles or scrap metal is a sure sign that the pain is trickling up. I will admit, I felt pity for him, but our money is still not going into the market.

Today was just one of those days. I have had quite a few of those days since these unscrupulous criminals took over. I vividly remember being called by an emotionally distraught employer during the 2001 State of the Union Address and told I was part of a brutal round of lay-offs. This experience, while far less personal, certainly ranks among the most surreal of my life.

I wished him all the luck in the world.

Door to Door Investment Broker...mm? My Grandfather , in the great depression, had to resort to to Door to Door selling as well. But he sold Nalley's potato chips door to door, in Tacoma, Wash, where Nalleys had a factory, and still does , I think.

Lot of people hadnt ever seen potato chips at that time. I think he made some money to tide them over in hard times.

My grandfather was a bootlegger in the early days of the Great Depression -- sold bathtub gin to put himself through college.

I was up at Van Mall the other day. Seems like half the store space there is empty, including two or more in a row in several places.

Thats just one of our many problems in this economy Newflyer. I have no reason whatsoever to goto the mall any longer. In many places around this country I would imagine that its the same feeling. Malls are the 21st century version of the ghettos. Malls, and Main Street were and are sacrificed for the Big Box mentality.

Now don't get me wrong I want a reason to goto the local mall or to my cities main street but our economy doesn't work that way anymore and we are at a lack of ideas on how to deal with this fact.

But again just one of many problems wrong with our economy.

We are buying as much local product as we can. Checking where our food comes from. Patronizing some of our regular local joints. Doing all we can to help out our local economy.

We are blessed to live in a neighborhood that does have many surviving and even thriving local businesses. They are not panicking just doing good business which begins with great customer service.

I am very proud of many of our Oregon politicians who chose to risk it today and not give Wall Street it's bailout. Main street needs to rule the market place. Wall Street should just be another means to the ends.

God what a day.

Main street will be the loser if something doesn't work out real quick. This is more than just bad mortgages.

It is a wonder that you folks {as a culture} have made it this far......DO NOT GET IT!!!!

WEstfield {vancouver}mall is about go thru a major overhaul .Most of these empty storefronts are from stores moved elsewhere in mall and stores that have not had leases renewed

I don't think main street is as much trouble as people say they are.

Those with serious investments are gonna lose, however, those who are working and producing will not lose as big. There still will be working and producing, unless you work for a middle man, then you are hosed, of course.

Wealth eventually comes down to innovation applied to labor and materials over time. Anybody doing that will be fine. Anybody leveraging that too much, without actually adding value, won't be fine, and that's just how it's going to all shake down.

IMHO, the market value that's evaporating is funny money. Never existed and it's gonna get corrected.

We then will find we are quite a bit less rich than we thought, and we will find (painfully) that we don't produce as much wealth as we thought.

Right there it will suck huge, but it gets better from there too, so there will be hope.

I think we are gonna have to hit the bottom, crawl around for a while, then suck it up, bring the jobs back and start working our way back into good times.

Market investments are not "funny money" it's real money. When the market suffers, people quit spending money. When people quit spending money, small businesses fail. When small business fails, jobs are lost. Those jobs ARE Main St and that market wealth is our retirement.

Actually, I don't believe it is.

When we've got one hard asset, leveraged multiple times in the form of these advanced financial devices, that's not real value. It's a derived value, based on some risk factors.

Literally, we are trading risk for dollars and assigning a value to that.

It's real in that we can buy, sell, trade these things. And it's real in that they can be used to secure real value assets, but at the end of the day, the actual value of these things is highly arbitrary.

Literally, many of these things are worth what we think they are and that's a huge part of the problem, and why Paulson wants the big bucket of money.

Should we actually go through a valuation exercize (which I hope happens however painful), we are going to find the stated or market value is not in line with the actual value.

That's funny money.

There is a solid reason why we used to differentiate investment banks from ordinary banks. That reason is the higher element of risk inherent in investment banking.

Now that paper has moved between the two, we have the more solid (as in less risky and far closer to real value) dollars co-mingled with the higher risk (and thus farther away from real value) dollars.

If you factor all of that out, real wealth that endures and can always be traded is either:

rare materials (gold, gems, etc...)

innovation applied to labor and materials over time.

We don't do much of that and in the global scheme of things means we just don't carry our weight like we used to.

Used to be most of our GDP was produced goods and services. Now it's mostly financials.

This is hard --really hard, but financials don't add value at that real money level where hard goods do.

Currency operates on trust these days. Used to be we literally used things of intrinsic value (as in the value is in the thing) to do business. That has a lot of issues, so we moved to a trust based system.

At first we backed currency with valuable things. That has problems too, credit being one of them.

So, we bit the bullet and went to a trust based currency.

This means, no matter how painful it is to realize, that a dollar is worth exactly what we think it is. Some of us think it's worth more and that's wall street. Some of us think it's worth less and that's main street and our national competetors.

One element that speaks to the trust behind a currency is those things you can buy with it. And that's the rub!!

Say you are China and you want to spend those dollars? What do you buy exactly?

We make a few things, so they could buy those. We tell stories and produce IP, so they could buy those too. After that it's literally buying us!

And that is what foreign companies have been doing. They buy roads, they buy companies, lands, IP, whatever they can get so that:

MORE OF THEIR DOLLARS ARE BACKED BY REAL VALUE; OTHERWISE, THEY KNOW JUST LIKE I'M SAYING HERE, THAT IT'S FUNNY MONEY.

Truth is, we've leveraged those homes multiple times and not everybody is able to cash in.

Quite simply, that's funny money as it's backed by RISK, not REAL INTRINSIC VALUE.

If it all goes to hell, those people building things of value will still be in business. People need those goods and services. That's intrinsic and real wealth.

Those holding lots of financials may or may not be in business because you just can't build a home or eat money.

Sorry man. It's tough, but that's where this all is headed.

We've inflated our actual value and now it's coming home to roost.

Sucks, but remember Republicans pushed for this.