Under the Mattress

With all of this talk about bailouts and renegotiating home mortgages with further enticements to the same banks that wrote the bad mortgages in the first place, I decided to check out stock performance this morning. It was easier to check bank stock performance than to look at my own retirement portfolio, which at last peek, was down 38%. I'm performing better than the banks.

Citigroup stock is down 71.10% in the last thirty days, 95.4% over the last year.

Who is still running the bank? Vikram S. Pandit hasn't lost his job.

Bank of America, which is advertising again during prime time, assuring people that their money is safe, closed down 34% in the last thirty days. But don't take any solace in that, over the last year, the stock is down 91.56%.

Those are America's biggest banks.

General Motors might file for bankruptcy. Imagine that! What was once the largest corporation in the world, making the most brands of cars, is leaking money, begging for another $16 billion to keep it running. I'm from the generation where a Chevy Impala convertible was hot. My first boyfriend had a burgundy Corvette that was his pride and joy.

How did this happen? Down 34.97% for the month; 91.9% for the year, GM might displace one out of ten workers from their jobs, including suppliers and dealers and subcontractors.

When things get too big, when we don't understand how they operate, they don't. No matter whether you have gone to Harvard Business School or Wharton or Yale. There's a lesson here for how to save America. Go small. Go sustainable.