This letter was emailed to me by a rep from Hanover Services and I found it interesting. Take a look:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the night of July 19, 64 A.D., a fire broke out among the shops lining the Circus Maximus, Rome's mammoth chariot stadium. The flames raged for six days before coming under control; then the fire reignited and burned for another three. When the smoke cleared, 10 of Rome's 14 districts were in ruin. The 800-year-old Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Atrium Vestae, the hearth of the Vestal Virgins, were gone. Two thirds of Rome had been destroyed.

History blamed Nero for the disaster, implying that he started the fire so that he could bypass the senate and rebuild Rome to his liking. The aristocrat and historian Tacitus, claimed that Nero watched Rome burn while merrily playing his fiddle. Yet there is evidence that, in 64 A.D., many Roman Christians believed in prophecies predicting that Rome would soon be destroyed by fire. Perhaps the fire was set off by someone hoping to make the prediction come true.

There was no end to Nero's ambition. One of his grandest plans was to tear down a third of Rome so that he could build an elaborate series of palaces that would be known as Neropolis. The senate, however, objected ardently to this proposal. Exactly what happened next has remained a mystery for nearly 2,000 years.

For seventy five years the gross domestic product (GDP) was the ultimate gauge for America's economic vitality. The numbers got revised up and down from time to time, usually for political reasons, but throughout the years everyone from politicians to economists used this numerical gauge to portray our economic success or failure in a global community. It was the really big number that all other numbers looked up to.

Robert F. Kennedy forty years ago said, the GDP measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

A decade ago America was the bastion of capitalism and free enterprise. A manufacturing power house that the free world looked up to. That changed quickly when China and Asia decided to tap into its endless supply of cheap labor making Walmart a household name, and the “made in China” label the rule and not the exception.

The flood of cheap imports from Asia changed the retailing world forever. America's manufacturing jobs slowly but surely drifted offshore and eventually, while no one was minding the store, we lost our place as the number one manufacturing economy in the world and instead became a nation of consumers.

There was a silver lining though , maybe we couldn’t be competitive as a manufacturing economy, but Americans were really good at building and selling houses. And why not? Everyone wanted a piece of the American dream, and a house was the ultimate example of that. Housing prices were going up, and it was a quick way for the average person to gain wealth. Besides, everyone could afford a home, even if it was bigger or more expensive than they could reasonably qualify for.

American home builders could build houses faster and cheaper than just about anyone else on the planet...And when it came time to sell those houses, qualifying for that mortgage was the last criteria used in the selling process. As long as there was a warm body standing at the door, and you could sign your name, the house was yours. There weren’t regulatory bodies out there, concerned about the trillions of dollars in mortgages that were being put in the hands of the unqualified buyers. It was all about selling homes.

For most of the past six years, America's GDP numbers painted a picture of prosperity and a growing economy

Manufacturing jobs were being lost at breakneck speed, but the housing sector was the underpinning that kept job growth a float. Home builders prospered and pounding nails was a lucrative living again. How quickly that changed when the housing bubble came to a screeching halt.

The estimates are staggering as Wall Street and Main Street try to recover from a financial meltdown of biblical proportions. From the pinnacle of success just a few years ago to the debts of despair, Wall Street made a valiant effort to get it act together before the fire storm burned it to its core. In the process, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns are gone forever. Freddie and Fannie are now truly government entities, and the fallout from those two failures may not yet be over. Tens of thousands of people are becoming unemployed weekly, and over 900,000 homes sit vacant across America as the foreclosure implosion marches steadily onward. And these numbers are expected to grow into 2009.

Hubris, greed and a blatant lack of regulation seem to have caused the ultimate decline of the institutions that stood the test of time, monuments to America's capitalist ways. Even if the government's bail-out strategy works, America will never be the same. The government believes the problem is complex, and the solution seems so simple: Let's have the American taxpayers pay the freight, no matter what the cost or high the bill goes.

Apparently we didn’t learn from the first bubble That we’ve inadvertently created a fundamental flaw in our economy which we can’t simply rectify by writing a check to people who prey on the whimsical spending habits of the American consumer. Creating a long term solution, which is to encourage the rebuilding of the manufacturing sector of the American economy, will migrate us away from a nation of consumers to a nation of producers. That strategy, in years to come, will go a long way to making sure our current crisis isn’t repeated...... Ronald J. Blekicki

Facts and Figures: Last year, foreign investors poured a record $414 billion into securing stakes in American companies, factories and other properties through private deals and purchases of publicly traded stock, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm. That was up 90 percent from the previous year and more than double the average for the last decade. It amounted to more than one-fourth of all announced deals for the year: Last year, states collected more than $19 billion form tobacco taxes.