Main Street vs. Wall Street_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Main Street vs. Wall Street

Reader question:

Main Street, Wall Street, what's the difference?

My comments:

Currently in the news, there's a general sense of doom and gloom over the global financial market due to problems from Wall Street, a real street in New York City where major banks are located. Wall Street is the financial center of America as well as the global capital market in general.

Spearheaded by failings first detected in mortgage firms whose managers promised home buyers too good a deal to sustain, other investment banks are soon found to have long been digging holes for themselves also. The upshot is, many – perhaps most because they all operate on more or less the same fundamental risk-reward principles – major banks are either insolvent or on the brink.

Hence the Bush Administration's highly necessary but unpopular bailout plan that effectively asks tax payers to fork out a gargantuan US$700 billion to get the banks back on their feet. That will help make sure banks are willing to lend money to each other and to manufacturers again. That is the plan. It may work. It will work to some extent because after all, money makes the world go round. Anyways, if it works, the global financial system can function as normal again.

And that, among other things, will probably start another vicious cycle, leading to something like the present debacle once again some time in future. That is, according to the innermost fears of the free-market advocate. Banks, you see, will have the money to hedge and gamble again, enriching corporate executives while perhaps accumulating more bad debts, till one day, the whole thing collapses again like a paper house. And the tax payer represented by the government has to step in do it again (so that banks can again have a clean sheet to start the roulette running one more time).