The Word on Monday - Gambling

Thanks to everyone that commented and congratulated Vicki and I on our birthdays.

As stated we did go on a trip to the mountains. This trip turned into a marathon gambling binge for us. We stayed till 3:00 AM on Saturday night and came back down to the valley and gambled away our winnings at Ft. McDowell Casino on the way to the house.

It was one of those once a year things that makes you sick of Casinos, slot machines, Elvis music (Indian Casinos are where Elvis music goes to die) and the whole money and greed thing. In other words it was a total ball. We actually won and enjoyed ourselves for almost the entire weekend. Only at the last did we tire of the fantasy and lose it back to the Native Americans. The whole amount of the winnings was just a couple hundred bucks, but it allowed us to pay our hotel room in cash and not charge it, pay for all the meals and still come home with a little cash.

Don't get me wrong; we weren't net winners. We took cash for expenses and gambling and it lasted the whole weekend with some left over. That's winning in our book.

And that brings us to today's word....GAMBLING

We budgeted for the loss, kept to the budget and enjoyed tempting the fates. We felt good when we won, played on the house's money for a while and then left before we went broke.

Wouldn't it have been nice if our financial geniuses had done the same? See, they gambled with our money, our kids' money and our grandkids' money and lost bigtime. Now we will be paying back that loss as a nation for a couple of generations. All because we allowed them to gamble with our future and our monetary resources.

And to make matters worse; most of them are more wealthy than ever. You won't be hearing about their suffering. That made theirs while the getting was good. It just wasn't any good at all for the rest of us.

Imagine if you will (picture Rod Serling talking now) that you are an inveterate gambler and you are given access to billions of dollars of other people's money. Can you see what might happen. That's essentially what happened with our financial institutions. They gambled away the worlds economic future.

All so they could make huge bonuses, get more stuff and drive a larger beemer.

There are two distinct types of gamblers: Recreational and Addictive. From my perspective it looks like the boys from Goldman Sachs et all are in the latter category. They won't stop risking our treasure till we take it back from them.

What do you think the chances of that happening are?

Here's a short article about what the Icelanders are doing. The great thing about the piece is what they did with pictures of Bankers.

RT