What Caused the Global Slowdown?response to yahoo answers question...

I believe the US over-innovated its financial processes. Making it easier for less financially secure folks to engage in debt instruments they could not even be expected to understand. We were seeing things like "sub-prime mortgages" and "125% financing" that only made sense in specific circumstances, like a growing economy.
Making it much worse is the practice of "bundling" hundreds of thousands of these shaky debts into collateral or guarantees against other loans, and those expected debt profits are then used to guarantee still more debt. The companies that rate these securities bowed to financial sector pressure to give them higher ratings than they deserved.
When folks can buy more houses than they can actually afford, not only are there government "anti-poverty" programs lurking somewhere in the background, but there is a period of time when the market doesn't have enough inventory, and we saw the results in television programs such as "Flip This House." Prices rise so fast that people paid too much for a house knowing they could still sell it for more.
Democrats are always looking out for a way to look like they are on the side of "the poor" and Republicans - who tried to stop this - have no defense against the charge that they want grandma to eat dog food, so the process has no check.
When oil prices spiked because of (again - the expectation/speculation of) Chinese and Indian demand, the house of cards started falling apart.
Those banks that were heavily vested in sub-prime stuff collapsed almost immediately, scaring the bejeepers out of the rest who quickly tightened up lending requirements. That made it difficult for the marginally successful companies to find the survival financing they needed. Which leads us to government bailouts.
The US is the unquestioned global economic power. When we sneeze, the world catches pneumonia. Global demand for oil has plummeted to the point that speculators are yawning with OPEC threats of production cuts.
Anti-US saber rattling is purely based on oil. Venezuela has few oil customers beside the US. Russia's tough talk is all based on their oil wealth. I have absolutely no evidence, but the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the slowdown might not have a geo-political strategic purpose as well.
News outlets are under tremendous pressure. Saying a newspaper makes money from telling us the news of the day is like saying a billboard makes money by giving us something to look at. News outlets are billboards, they make a living from advertising, not selling news. The more emotion (fear and anger) they can pour into a story the more attention they get and the more they can charge for the same 2" by 4" ad. Even under these scary economic times, news ad revenue is nose-diving for a number of reasons. They are panicking and are desperate for "bad " news to get your attention. They are going to encourage us to fear and anger to sell billboard space. This is going to be a difficult period for us. We were already too hostile with each other before this. My greatest fear is not that I'll lose my house (I might - you might) but that we'll degenerate into a bunch of mindless thugs out only for ourselves. God help us.

The Real ID Act

Found a press conference of DHS Secretary Chertoff at Biometric Bits, via the Wiki article on the Real ID Act .

This picture is for chuckles....

From the press conference...

There are really three reasons why secure driver's licenses and security standards for driver's licenses make a lot of sense. First of all, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, secure identification is an essential way of ensuring that people are who they say they are. And therefore this kind of identification gives us a tremendous tool in preventing dangerous people from getting on airplanes or getting into federal buildings.

Second, secure identification happens to be a very good way to prevent illegal immigrants from
pretending to be American citizens so they can work illegally in this country. And make no mistake
about it: identity fraud among illegal immigrants is a serious problem. It harms the legal worker, it deceives the honest employer, and it destroys the privacy and the good credit of innocent Americans every year.
During fiscal year 2007, when we were conducting worksite enforcement operations, enforcing the
immigration laws, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made 863 criminal arrests, and
ended up charging more than 500 individuals with state and federal document fraud crimes, including
identity theft and Social Security fraud.

Third, secure identification protects all of us from the pernicious plague of identity theft. Last year, our Secret Service arrested over 4,300 suspects, including both legal and illegal workers, for identity theft crimes that totaled $690 million in actual fraud loss to individuals and financial institutions. Studies show that roughly 35 percent of these kinds of fraud cases involve the use of fraudulent driver's licenses or phony state ID cards. And in the year 2005, according to the FTC, identity theft cost American households $64 billion, and 28 percent of those incidents likely involved the use of a phony driver's license.

Secretary Chertoff emphasizes over and over that the "secure identification" created by this legislation will only replace driver's licenses, and be used to allow folks to board planes and into federal buildings. From what I've read elsewhere, the legislation does not disallow or prevent anyone (or anything) from demanding its presentation. For ex., if you want to buy a house, there will come a point in the process where your social security number is requested. You can refuse. The mortgage company is not allowed to demand it from you, but they are somehow still allowed to refuse the loan if you don't wish to comply. At least, that has been my experience.
Under this legislation (the new constitution for the european union is an easier read - i'm just repeating what i've read elsewhere here) there are no restrictions for it's use. In other words, there is no language in the bill - at all - that discusses buying or selling in any way. Whether that is good or bad, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But mortgage companies are already pretty darned leary about accepting anyone's "word" about their identity. You may rest assured that they WILL know - to the greatest extent that such a thing CAN be known - that the buyer is who s/he says s/he is.

So is this whole issue really a problem, or is the problem that we don't really trust our neighbors anymore? In any case, here we are six years after 9/11, and it's not so easy to fly a 747 into a building anymore.