It’s funny, I was feeling that way this morning about just stepping back and being calm — and wrote this blog: http://awakeningfromthedream.blogspot.com/2008/09/spaciousness-of-questions.html

Also, what you said about your cat resonated with me because the same thing happened with my cat earlier this year. We did the vet visits, the panicking, etc. It was the moment lying in bed with him in which I told my mind, well Harvey there asleep looks just like my healthy cat Fritz. He’s just resting. Next thing you know, Harvey perked back up again and was fully healed.

I’ve been reading The Teachers Manual and loving it. From Who Are Their Pupils:

“The world of time is the world of illusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open; yet to be made. What has been learned and understood and long since passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach.”

This is over and accomplished, and I’m living in a memory of what already occurred. Amazing. It seems like it’s happening now, with a future yet to be determined, but it’s already happened, over and gone … and I’m home in Heaven.

It is soooo easy to get sucked in (for me too). Are these not the challenges to our faith in the teachings of Jesus and ACIM?

Love to all,

Laura

New York Times:

A $700 billion dollar rescue plan for Wall Street, but will it work?

If it all comes to pass — if Uncle Sam becomes the repository for the radioactive leftovers of bad real estate bets — will the crisis lift? Will the fear that has kept banks clinging to their dollars, starving the economy of capital, give way to free-flowing credit?

Most broadly, what are the long-term costs of the government’s stepping in to restore order after so many wealthy financiers became so much wealthier through what now seem like reckless bets on housing — bets now covered with public dollars?

Significant skepticism confronts the plan. Under a proposal circulating Saturday, the Treasury could spend as much as $700 billion to buy mortgage-linked investments, then sell what it can as it works out the messy details of the loans. But no one really knows what this cosmically complex web of finance will be worth, making the final price tag for the taxpayer unknowable. One may just as well try to predict the weather three years from Tuesday.

Also, what message does that send to the next investment bank caught up in the next speculative bubble and contemplating the risks of jumping in while wondering who is ultimately on the hook if things go awry?

Many economists say such questions are beside the point. The nation is gripped by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Before Thursday night, when the Treasury secretary, the Federal Reserve chairman and leaders on Capitol Hill proclaimed their intentions to take over bad debts, the prognosis for the American financial system was sliding from grim toward potentially apocalyptic.

It looked like we might be falling into the abyss.

The financial crisis gripping the United States is the direct outgrowth of the speculative orgy in real estate that began early this decade. Once home values began falling two years ago, the financial institutions that had poured capital into real estate confronted a very big problem.

Here’s what I found on Wikepedia:

John Maynard Keynes (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments’ fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.

I’m really dense in areas of politics and economics. Super dense. I don’t know anything. It just seems really stupid to me to bail out a failing company for $84 billion dollars – and then to spend an additional $700 billion to bail-out other failing companies – money that doesn’t actually exist, and then pass the bill on to taxpayers.

If a company is failing, let it fail.

How come the government doesn’t bail out mom & pop businesses?

If they are bailing out the large companies, then they should be bailing out the small companies too. But of course, everyone would call that insane.

What’s wild to me is when large banking companies are successful then the CEO’s become billionaires with private jets and fancy homes … while ordinary folks struggle with their own bills. But when these companies fail, the taxpayers pick up the bill.

??

It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

I don’t even know what the word macroeconomics means…