Yet according to the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform, the reported $150 billion that Wall Street is paying itself in compensation and bonuses this year would be enough to solve the budget crisis of every one of the 50 states or create millions of jobs or prevent all foreclosures for four years.

All of this wretched excess is occurring as more and more people can't afford a roof over their heads. Foreclosures were up another 5 percent in the third quarter -- 23 percent more than a year ago. Fewer Americans are willing to buy foreclosed properties, and the Obama administration's foreclosure prevention plan has been a bust so far -- way too timid, critics say, and many of the banks won't play ball, refusing to negotiate in good faith with homeowners desperate to hold on.

We got a firsthand look at the crisis this week when thousands lined up at the Jacob Javits Convention Center just a few blocks from our Manhattan offices to attend a mortgage assistance event sponsored by the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA). So many showed up for this leg of the "Save the Dream Tour" that on many days, staff and volunteers stayed to help until 1 in the morning.

NACA has had success getting homeowners and banks together to work out a deal to prevent foreclosure. But the big banks' return to the government of the TARP bailout money with which we underwrote them over the last 14 months is a mixed blessing -- great to have the cash returned so quickly, terrible because any leverage Washington held over the banks because of the loans virtually vanishes with the payback. They're back in the saddle and not inclined to be of much assistance helping anyone else out, especially those in mortgage trouble.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times wrote in the wake of Obama's Monday meeting with Wall Street's top guns (three of whom failed to show up because of airport delays)

Executive compensation, leverage limits and lending standards were all issues that Washington said it planned to change -- and when the taxpayers were the shareholders of these firms, it probably could have done so. But now the White House has been left in the position of extending invitations, rather than exercising its clout. And in the figurative and literal sense, it is getting stood up.

Afterward, Obama said, "The problem is there's a big gap between what I'm hearing here in the White House and the activities of lobbyists on behalf of these institutions or associations of which they're a member up on Capitol Hill."

That's putting it mildly. This week, the American Bankers Association sent out an update and "call to action" memorandum crowing over its success in watering down the bank reform bill that was approved by the House and urging its members to beat back similar legislation in the Senate. Self-righteously, it concludes, "As one of your New Year's resolutions, please vow to do everything in your power to show, and to have your colleagues in your bank show, your Senators the right path to true reform."

It helps when the right path is paved with silver and gold. As "Crossing Wall Street," a November report from the Center for Responsive Politics, notes:

The finance, insurance and real estate sector has given $2.3 billion to candidates, leadership PACs and party committees since 1989, which eclipses every other sector ...

The financial sector has also been a voracious lobbying force, spending an unprecedented $3.8 billion since 1998, while sending an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to make its case. That's more money than any other sector has spent on influence peddling. Not even the healthcare sector, which spun up a lobbying frenzy this year over health reform, has spent more.

The banks are making a list and checking it twice. And we shouldn't forget that during his run for the White House, the finance sector filled Obama's stocking with $39.5 million worth of campaign contributions, more than for any other presidential candidate.

God bless us, every one!

Research support provided by "Bill Moyers Journal" producer William Brangham and associate producer Katia Maguire.

Mysak's column is based on a 78-page report by Pennsylvania's Auditor General, Jack Wagner.

The Pennsylvania Auditor General, Jack Wagner, is no fan of swaps. His report concluded that they are "highly risky and impenetrably complex transactions that, quite simply, amount to gambling with public money." He asked the state to forbid their use, recommended municipalities avoid them "from this day forward," and advised those who did use them to terminate the things immediately.

Just so nobody would misunderstand, Wagner asked the General Assembly to prohibit the state’s municipalities from using swaps "or any of the specific devices and techniques encompassed therein currently in existence or yet to be invented in connection with the issuance of public debt."

Yet to be invented! Take that, financial innovation!

Best line from Mysak, in reference to the fact that the municipalities were ill prepared to deal with the consequences of their financial bets gone wrong:

As the Pennsylvania auditor general pointed out, municipalities rarely budget for financial-instrument catastrophe.

But who does?

Roubini echoes something I noted a week ago. If investors think economic recovery will be "anemic" there could be "a rise in bearish sentiment on commodities -- and in bullishness about the U.S. dollar." So they Fox News hypesters pushing gold as the only answer for troubled times could be leading their disciples right off the cliff.

But then there's Roubini's kicker!

The recent rise in gold prices is only partially justified by fundamentals. Nor is it clear why investors should stock up on gold if the global economy dips into recession again and concerns about a near depression and rampant deflation rise sharply. If you truly fear a global economic meltdown, you should stock up on guns, canned food, and other commodities that you can actually use in your log cabin.

Of course who is to say that fearful investors aren't doing all of the above? After all, gun sales in some of the most depressed parts of the U.S. have gone through the roof in the past year.

But Michael Grunwald's looooooong profile of Bernanke does a pretty decent job of defending and explaining Time's choice. Whether you nod your head or snort in disagreement depends on one question, above all else: Do you believe that Bernanke's aggressive actions as Fed chairman prevented a second Great Depression?

If the answer is yes, then it is a no-brainer. Of course he should be Person of the Year. Heck, give him person of the decade, or 21st century. There is much unhappiness in both conservative and liberal quarters about the state of the economy, about unemployment, deficits, compromises on healthcare and regulatory reform, bailouts and foreclosures and all the rest. But nothing we are looking at right now is anywhere near as bad as another full-fledged depression would be.

As Bernanke told Time, "the markets were in anaphylactic shock" (and I'm betting he's the first winner of the Person of the Year award who is comfortable with using the word "anaphylactic" to describe an economy in a state of severe allergic reaction to the point of near paralysis and death). A year ago at this time, anyone who understood the depth of seriousness of what was happening had a hard time not feeling the kind of fear that makes it hard to sleep at night. 2009 could have become one of the worst years, economically speaking, in U.S. history.

So Bernanke, who, as everyone knows by now, made his bones as an academic scholar by studying the Great Depression, went into overdrive:

From Time:

...[H]e conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed's balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.

And guess what? We didn't plummet headlong into a depression. At least not yet, we haven't.

But of course we don't know, and we will never know, what would have happened if Bernanke had sat tight. And of course there were many things that could have been done a lot better, particularly the bailout of AIG, and the failure to push through real regulatory reform immediately, when it might have had a chance to succeed. And then there's the long Greenspan-Bernanke legacy of light supervision and easy money, which created some of the basic conditions for the financial crisis in the first place. All that explains why Bernanke is not being regarded as a hero in Congress, and why popular dissatisfaction with the Fed is sky high. With unemployment over 10 percent, we're looking for someone to blame. Bernanke, the most powerful person in the world when it comes to executing economic policy, is an obvious choice. And there is a growing chorus on the left that accuses Bernanke of becoming complacent now that the worst is past, and not being aggressive enough on the unemployment front.

Still. As Grunwald writes, "It's no consolation to the 1 in 6 Americans who are underemployed, the 1 in 7 homeowners with a delinquent mortgage or the 1 in 8 families on food stamps, but there would be far more joblessness, foreclosures and hunger were it not for Ben Bernanke."

I think most economists, whether conservative or liberal, would agree with this assumption. It's a tough call to make, lauding someone as a hero because of something that didn't happen, but upon reflection, it doesn't seem all that crazy.

UPDATE: Felix Salmon, smart, as usual.

"We have an agenda in this country now that I would regard as being a radical agenda. We had a budget come out that put a level of fear in this country that I've not seen ever in my life and I think that changed everything. This is the greatest wealth destruction I've ever seen in my life by any president.

In ensuing days, Cramer opened up the heavy artillery. In a pitch for his show, he declared that "Government of, by, and for the corporation is perishing from the Earth [and that] our country is now run by a president and a Bolshevik-leaning Democratic Party that are unfavorable to stocks and the people who own them." He compared Obama's cap-and-trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions to Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

In the weeks that followed, Cramer was called out by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and then humiliated by Jon Stewart with a series of clips and a riveting half-hour one-on-one interview. But then, suddenly, he disappeared from the headlines, for a very simple reason. He had been utterly, incredibly, irredeemably wrong. Because almost immediately after his crazy outbursts, the U.S. stock market went on a sustained bull run that has continued more or less right up until the present day. Lenin need not worry. If Obama had any aspirations at radical Bolshevik wealth-destruction, he failed miserably.

It is both hilarious and disturbing to go back and review Cramer's "Today" show appearance. "I think this is a bad market and I don't think people should count on it for anything positive," he said. He was wrong. "I see no reason to own any bank stocks," he said. He was wrong. He declared that "the stock market is the country right now." He was wrong.

Today, Obama's critics on the left savage the president because they hunger for a little more in the way of Bolshevik wealth redistribution than they have been getting, while his opponents on the right have picked up Cramer's socialism critique in a bizarre reality-distortion field that ignores everything that has actually been done to stabilize the country in as market-friendly a way as possible, with a second Great Depression looming right around the corner. Cramer doesn't seem too crazy anymore, now that a far more berserk contingent rampages across the media landscape every day. But the important thing to remember about Cramer is not only that he had his moment in the crazy sun last March. It's that he was just plain wrong. And yet he's still handsomely rewarded for spewing stock market tips and political commentary. That's what's really crazy.