Like John McCain, I am not an expert in finance, but I am trying to connect the dots. It seems the investment banks are holding almost a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities that no one else will buy so the Federal Government (read taxpayers) needs to buy them. Why? Didn’t the Chinese buy all this paper before, and isn’t that the reason that we were bombarded by the banks offering us big, unsecured loans? So now, that must mean, the Chinese (still Communist) have stopped buying this paper making it almost worthless (perhaps the Arabs were involved too - they don’t like us either). Wait, I see more dots – did we not fight a long, costly war ostensibly to keep the Chinese from conquering Southeast Asian and then the World? I think I see a picture emerging – it is a Chinese wall hanging that says in Chinese: “If you can’t beat them at boxing, try chess”. – Or is it an Arab wall hanging saying the same thing in Arabic?