Brokerage house officer: “I’m not getting bailed out.”

September 26th, 2008 at 12:42am Chuck Sweeny

While I’m interviewing the Rockford woman in the dining car, one of her fellow diners chimes in from the next booth.

“I guess I’m one of the bad guys you’ve been talking about,” he says, laughing. It’s Tracy Wiswall of Memphis, formerly of New Orleans. He’s an officer of a brokerage firm called Wunderlich Securities.

“I’m not getting bailed out,” he hastens to add.  I figure, good, we have an expert. What’s he think about what’s going on in the fiscal universe? Is it curtains? Or not?

“There’s a reasonable debate about what’s happening. They don’t know who they’re bailing out. Nobody knows.” A lot of the softness in the economy is the result of bad mortgage debt, he says.

“And the reason we have a mortgage crisis is because of all the Ninja loans that were made,” Wiswall said.

Ninja loans? What in the world is a Ninja loan, I ask him.

“Ninja. No income, no job loans. They were loaning readily available cash to anybody.”

Oh, that makes sense, I say.

Unlike President Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, our man Wiswall says. “I’m glad they said, no way, we aren’t getting this done right away, the process is too rushed.”

Wiswall says he’ll vote for McCain, but he’s not enthusiastic about it. He would have preferred libertarian Ron Paul.

“If I had a choice of McCain, Obama and Hillary, I might have voted for her,” he said.

I asked the classic right direction, wrong direction question.

“Right direction? No,” he said. We are going the way of the Romans, he added.

“The Romans built  a vast empire, but the bigger they got, the more liberal they became, and they got too tired to fight. The U.S. is kind of moving that way. It’s more and more liberal.”

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