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Welcome to Round 2 of Main Street vs. Wall Street. The divide is the worst I've seen in my 40 years of writing about finance. In a new TIME poll, 75% of the respondents say they believe Wall Street will revert to business as usual, 67% want the government to force pay cuts, and 59% want more government regulation. (See a PDF of TIME's exclusive poll data...
...Main and Wall are never going to love each other. And they probably shouldn't, because their interests aren't identical. But if we're going to get through this mess as a society and regain our prosperity, Main Street and Wall Street need to understand each other. And they don't. (See how Americans are spending...
Without a doubt, the financial meltdown and its ensuing horrors began on Wall Street. However, Main Street is not a totally innocent lamb in all this. Yes, the greedheads tempted us with mortgages and other products we couldn't afford. But you could have said no, as many of us did. And you could have tried to live within your means or, better yet, below them, instead of falling prey to financial fantasies...
...Main Street has paid a price for the ultra-low interest rates the Fed has kept in place to encourage banks to lend and to keep commerce flowing. Cheap money is nice for lenders and borrowers - but it's devastating for savers, especially for retirees who use interest income to supplement Social Security. If you had $500,000 stashed away - not a bad nest egg - you could earn a no-risk $20,000 to $25,000 annually (before taxes) two years ago buying bank CDs or short-term Treasury securities. Now you earn less than $5,000 in an average...
...what's to be done? In general, the Federal Government has been too passive about fixing the real problems, not too activist. That said, here are a few rules of the road for Wall Street and Main Street: (See which businesses are bucking the recession...