[What'saCobra?]

Most everyone feels somewhat disturbed that workers negotiated in good faith for benefits and salaries that eventually turn out to be re-negotiated. But, such agreements might become ineffective due to various factors not truly within worker control. Military service, market forces, financial results, church service, health services, legal advice, consultant 'recommendations' and much more are, unfortunately, subject to error, revision and adjudication. Everything is subject to a lousy economy for whatever sequence of obvious or obscure events including war, pestilence and incompetency, just to pick a few.

For instance, in trying to correct the falsely high valuations of assets and shares held by Enron, which when discovered tipped the entire company upside-down into the proverbial toilet, the Accounting Standards Board and AICPA, after considerable hand-wringing and hearings at every level of society including Big Brother, public audits became subject to marking-down of over-valued assets to their current market values in order to issue a "clean opinion" with no scary qualifications. The quick phrase to describe this rule became "mark to market". It typically marked valuations down, not up.

The previous asset valuation method was at COST... how much did you pay? How long ago? Still performing? Not a bad old method for several hundred years or so, since the Italians (!) invented double-entry book-keeping to reduce theft and divide authorities/responsibilities. But, probably un-intended was this effect of this rule on banking audits, when lousy asset-based mortgage paper, still properly performing within normal payment policies, was required to be marked down with some sort of guess of the current market price. AND, if the market value continued to drop (have you looked at real estate prices lately?), the bank, mortgage bank or lending institution MUST continue to drop the book entry accordingly.

Overnight, bank balance sheets were bleeding in the streets with loans outstanding far in excess of their asset holdings valuations. This threatened not only the viability of the bank as a going concern and the legality of their State or Federal Charter, but made continued business as usual actually a federal offense that would nullify their FDIC insurance of depositors money. As certain elements of the "public" became aware of these ratios, they withdrew their moneys from the risky bank. The Fed Reserve watched these funds each night and stepped in as they chose to force various mergers, sales and closings.

Presuming banker honesty (ahem!), this was a huge restructuring of the entire banking profession, not according to well-defined and well-adjudicated agreements and laws. Everyone's career and retirement plans have been severely adjusted downwards, mostly. (Of course, dem party/family compliant FNMA and Freddy mac executives mostly have not been asked to return their bonuses based on fictitious profits (volume based sweet-heart deals).)

When certain un-American entities (Soros et al) decided to short-sell mortgage bankers big time, the cards fell on the floor, as planned.

Given all this and more, putting off the unfortunate isn't in most of our interests. Buying FORD shares may be a brilliant move. i hope anyone makes a bundle on it. But, i'm not personally that brave. i would rather bet on GM or maybe a newly merged FORD/Chrysler. But, i would even rather skip them all at the moment.