THE BAILOUT COMES UP JUST SHORT OF BEING COMPREHENSIVE

Written for the Colorado Springs Business Journal
by Mike Boyd September 26, 2008

Dear President Bush, Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke:

I know the three of you are fairly busy at the moment saving the world from an economic meltdown of biblical proportion, but I was hoping that you might have a minute to patch up a smaller, but in my opinion no less important, financial crisis.

You see, I noticed in the bailout proposal that was hammered out earlier this week that there wasn’t any provision included (even in the small print, and trust me, I ready that puppy back and forth and three ways to Wednesday) to provide any financial assistance to make the pain of my own poor investment decisions more bearable.

While I’m sure it was simply an administrative oversight, I would very much appreciate it if you could tack on an amendment somewhere or issue an executive order or some such other type of decree to absolve me of my losses.

Again, I know that the three of you are very busy, and I know that you might not have had time to keep up with reading all my columns, but trust me — I’ve taken a beating the last year or so on the investment front.

It’s not that I’ve been greedy (I got over that when my 401(k) went belly up because I was sure that Enron was the Yellow Brick Road to early retirement). No, I just haven’t made a lot of good choices as of late. I’ve had some hot prospects, but they’ve all crashed and burned. I know it’s my fault, but all things considered, I’m not sure how my request could be deemed completely unreasonable.

And it’s not like we’re talking about a trillion dollars or anything. Heck, you could probably cover my losses with a rounding error.

If you will be so kind as to make me whole again, I promise to start listening to Allan Roth’s investment advice. I promise that I’ll diversify my portfolio and embrace compounding interest over time instead of instant gratification and sexy stock charts.

I believe that the Internal Revenue Service has my checking account information on file, so if you could arrange for a direct deposit, that would be great.

If you need to review the specifics of my request, feel free to visit www.csbj.com and read my archived scribblings. If you’d like to chat personally, my direct line at the office is below.

Thank you in advance for your prompt consideration and resolution of this matter.