As the old song goes, the thigh bone's connected to the knee bone, the knee bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the ... you get the idea. The entire economic crisis is connected to the woes of the banking industry. We loathe these institutions for good reason. But the brutal truth is that we need 'em. If we don't figure out how to get the hundreds of billions of dollars in toxic assets off the balance sheets of the megabanks, then credit will remain frozen and it's only a matter of time before we're all eating cat food.This doesn't mean President Obama has to drop everything else and just focus on banking, which is the argument advanced by the same knuckleheads who didn't see the collapse coming. There are only so many hours in a day that any man should be made to discuss credit-default swaps. Good presidents multitask and strike quickly across a broad front early in their terms. But Warren Buffett is right when he says that the president needs to be clearer on the subject of the banks.
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