Never bet on Girl Scouts in the NFL. It just doesn't work out well.

Another week, another smattering of economic insanity to report. Those kids on Wall Street do a good job of keeping my newsletter-writing life easy.

Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that we heard a lot about while the sky was falling in late 2008 has been charged with some severe underhandedness. They have been accused of evidently allowing Paulson & Co. (a big ol’ hedge fund) to “advise” Goldman about structuring an investment portfolio out of the crappiest of the crappy subprime mortgage-backed securities. Paulson promptly bet against that very portfolio. When the portfolio tanked, Paulson & Co. made a gigantic profit.

Basically, that’s like making a football team out of girl scouts, telling the people that fund the team that they’re really 300 lb. gorillas, and betting everything against them. Quite a dickish move.

Though it would be satisfying to see a team of girl scouts try to play in the NFL. Take THAT for charging me six bucks for a box of thin mints. Stupid delicious addictive cookies.

What will inevitably result from this alleged fiasco? Regulatory reform. And lots of it. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is up to politicians to decide, but I for one do not like the idea of corpo­rate fat-cats defrauding the investing public. Just my opinion.

Florida is making headlines again for how awful we are. By recent numbers, we are in 5th place na­tionwide for unemployment (12.3%) and 3rd in foreclosure rates (1 in 57 homes in in foreclosure). We’re slowly moving up in the world, friends. On the bright side, there will be a lot of vacant proper­ties for people to squat in while they’re unemployed.

Speaking of foreclosures, the pace of foreclosures is accelerating. As a country, we’re up 25% from where we were a year ago this month. Despite what you may think, it is not because more people are feeling the financial squeeze and just falling behind. The major driver is that banks can now finan­cially handle the losses of re-acquiring these properties.

Essentially we bailed out the banks with our tax money and now they have enough cash to hire people to take our homes from us and handle the on-book losses that those foreclosures represent. Yay!

Wait… no. Not yay. Not yay at all. The opposite of yay. Booooooo.

To stem the tide of foreclosures, Washington is shaking their stick at banks and bank investors to al­low principal writedowns on underwater mortgages. Of course, it’s not happening. So, in a phenome­non called strategic foreclosure, people who owe more than their home is worth are walking away, dropping home prices and putting more people in the “underwater” group. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Not my rosiest report, but it is what it is. I’ll report happy things when the world gives me happy things to report.