Washington and Wall Street are dissing Main Street, small-town financial columnist writes

Financial columnist Don McNay of Richmond, Ky., pop. 30,000, is peeved at politicians in Washington on the anniversary of the financial crisis that prompted the first bailout bill.

"All the events of the last year proved at least one point: Wall Street and Washington don’t understand what is happening on Main Street," McNay writes on The Huffington Post. "The people in Washington are pushing the line that they saved us from 'something even worse.' Like what? No one on Main Street is buying it. Watch a Main Street crowd boo when a politician defends the bailouts. Wall Street firms are calculating their next big bonuses.

"In the meantime, people on Main Street are suffering. Unemployment is high and uncertainty is higher. All the 'happy talk' from the elites of Washington and Wall Street is not going to make it go away. People are not going to buy houses and cars until they feel secure about their jobs and their futures. Unemployment remains near 10 percent, but the people in Washington decided to go on to other topics."

McNay adds, "All of the people in charge of the economy have one thing in common: they have never run a business. Geithner, Bernanke, Dr. Lawrence Summers (and even President Obama, for that matter) have never met a payroll or had a business loan that they were personally responsible to repay. All spent a lot of time on Wall Street. I wish one of them had spent a few minutes on Main Street. On Main Street, you don’t get to use the taxpayers’ money as collateral. If you screw up, your own money is riding on the outcome." (Read more)