"Hey, the man built the Staples center"

Today I was a guest at a real-estate conference in downtown Los Angeles. A friend of mine who works for a small firm (Jones, Lang, LaSallee) invited me and I was happy to go. The featured speaker for the day was billionaire Ed Roski. The company he founded, majestic realty, as well as his minority ownership in the Lakers, Kings, Staples Center etc. has made him a very rich man. (#42 in the world according to Forbes) Ed Roski is a visionary who has plans to bring back a professional football team to Los Angeles. It goes without saying he is a brilliant man (and a proud Bruin) and we would all be wise to listen to his words as we collectively try to recover from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. (Thanks Bush, that M.B.A. did a lot of good) Now, it is important to remember that Ed Roski, as well as all the speakers on the panel, are Republican! They have no ax to grind, they are not looking to blame anyone, they simply are reporting the facts about our economy. They presented slide after slide of where we were in 2000, and where we are now in 2008. They were making the point that EVERY ECONOMIC INDICATOR IS DOWN! This is unprecedented, it has never before happened in the history of the United States. Ed and the speakers opened up for the audience to ask questions and people kept on asking, "how could this have happened?" Every member of the panel spoke of an unregulated wall street, unregulated credit, unregulated lending, unregulated borrowing, a "laissez faire" attitude towards regulation. Think of Enron, BearStearns, Wachovia, Meryl Lynch, Fannie, Freddie, Lehman (You get the picture) Now, the people in the room were hopeful because our new President promised massive new regulations in the financial industries. It is human nature to want more, to give in too greed, to take the short-cut, to take the quick buck. The role of government is to regulate human behavior, if you don't believe me why do we have cops and a military? So why would Bush promote this massive deregulation of business? It is not because he is the devil, or because he is stupid, he just believed in the wrong economic philosophy. And for this, just like Ed Roski, I hold him accountable for his mistakes. The bottom line is that we hire the President to do a job, and one of his main responsibilities is managing the economy. The simple fact is that Bush is the worst President since Hoover.