Forum Post: So, you want to strike fear into Big Money?

What was one of the major instruments of greed contributing to the crash of 2008? CDOs...Collateralized debt obligations...and CDS...credit default swaps. This is where people with no dog in your fight make bets on whether you'll fail or succeed. They roll your debt into a structured asset-backed security and issue bonds or use it as collateral in the repurchase market, or they bet on your failure to collect premiums on assets they don't directly own. It's a house of cards where the biggest losers were you and me.

So, even though they don't issue these in the vast rabid quantities they did in the past, the greed that they fostered is still there. Banks received TARP money to help small businesses and struggling homeowners...but they just kept it and choked off credit and assistance to those who needed it most.

What's my point? It's simple. Stop paying your debt. Stop paying your car loan, your mortgage, your home equity loan...etc... What does this do? It puts a choke hold on the available funds the conventional and investment banks have to operate. It puts the fear of God into Wall Street as the true source of capital disappears.

"But they'll take my house!", you might say. They can start legal proceedings against you, but as it stands now, it's taking 2-3 years to clear a foreclosure...and that's with only with approximately 800,000 foreclosures in the pipeline now. How long will it take to clear 25 million foreclosures? The system will collapse upon itself if they decide to prosecute every single case. They don't have decades to wait to collect on 25 million foreclosures. They'll run out of capital and become insolvent long before that happens.

You hurt a rich man by making him a poor man. Send a message to Washington, Wall Street and the big financial institutions. We're voting with our wallets. You change the rules, or we stop funding you.

After 3-6 months of this they'll be begging Congress to pass legislation governing their operations just to re-open the spigot.

Give yourself a taxpayer bail out. Keep your money and tell them to eat their TARP bailout.

C1