The markets (especially the DJIA and NASDAQ) are overvalued based on historical trend analysis. Overvaluation tends to correct itself if the government stays out of the picture, but Greenspan kept prime inter-bank lending rates too low for too long, and painted a ridiculously rosy picture of the economy.

Even as jobs kept flowing out of the country, the "Maestro" proclaimed optimism in "observations" of corporate proeductivity gains! Over and over again, (e.g. 1987, 1995, and again in 2000) Greenspan failed to see the market bubbling out of control, although he would later claim either not to have seen any bubbles or to have been aggressively fighting bubbles, depending on whom he was addressing. By maintaining interest rates at unreasonable and certainly artificially low levels, Greenspan took almost all risk out of the stock market. At one point, in his 1995 address at the American Enterprise Institute, he actually had to guts to question the market’s loss of fear, and spoke about "irrational exhuberance", but he apparently opted to credit (or blame) technology growth as the reason for stock market mania.

Greenspan’s fondness for artificially low rates and his hesitancy to make market-correcting rate increases have earned him the moniker of "Bubble King".

Nonetheless, stock market bubbles usually correct themselves, and this generally happens more readily when another sector of the economy (such as housing) is growing at a healthy pace. Unfortunately, housing grew at a a pace that was far too rapid to be healthy, culminating in our current mess. A number of factors combined to make this mess, particularly where government is involved.

Much of the real estate carnage began with Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977. It required banks and other depository/lending institutions in low-income areas to issue mortgages to individuals who in other areas would be considered non-creditworthy.

To offset the risk to these institutions, government offered to back these mortgages through programs like Fannie Mae and HUD. Obviously, the cost of this risk is borne by the deep-pockets of the American taxpayer.

Since the pool of tax funds is enormous, it invites corruption. Corrupt and greedy mortgage brokers made and sold far too many bad mortgages because it was government (i.e. the taxpaying public) who assumed the risk.

When the mortgages got packaged into tradeable securities, corrupt and greedy funds brokers sold these securities to Fannie Mae, who made money for its buyers by selling "insurance" in the form of credit swaps. It’s like a corrupt multilevel marketing scam or pyramid scheme where the profits move upwards to a few early "investors", and the costs keep getting assumed by newcomers. And government has gotten so bloated and incapable of self-monitoring that we should know better than to trust it to add $1 trillion to our already massive $10 trillion national debt, yet apparently not enough people contacted their congress officials with pleas not to enact the big bailout.

It’s clear that government simply doesn’t care about the future, opting instead to push even more debt on our children and their successors. It is time for a return to a Jeffersonian style of government - a minimum government whose responsibility goes no further than protecting the civil rights of all its citizens and maintaining a common currency backed by solid assets. Neither of the current presidential candidate’s platforms address reduction of government (or of government intrusion into citizen’s private lives). I truly believe that the best course of action right now is a tax-payer revolt, but I admit that I am too ignorant as to any reasonable ways to accomplish this, so I’m doing what I can to voice my concerns to my local, state, and national officials. I ask you all to do the same. Sorry for the long rant.