Go back a year to last January and ask yourself if you could have ever imagined the $700 billion bank bailout, Fannie May and Freddie Mac crumbling down, the big three automakers pleading for the government's assistance just to stay afloat for a few months and receiving $23.4 billion and the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) failures in the former Nasdaq chairman Bernard Madoff's $50 billion embezzlement scheme case. If we thought that the failures of the years before, such as Enron and the bottomless pit of the home foreclosures were bad enough, these recent economic failures broke the paradigm and dragged us to a new low; where even the term "billion" has lost its true significance and value.
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