Instead of dropping money into the sink hole of Wall Street, we should be creating a landscape where startups can flourish. We have the resources we need to get out of this mess - and it is the collective brain-power and ingenuity of our people, young and old alike.

The Internet created an environment with low barriers of entry for new ideas to take flight, basically a much more level playing field, where those with limited resources could compete, on merit with larger established companies. If the government is going to throw money at the economic mess, throw it in this direction, in the form of incentives for startups and entrepreneurs, even capital, etc.

VC's have shown you don't even need to be all that selective. You could almost have a lottery system without wasting a lot of time and money reviewing ideas because there are enough smart people with drive and good ideas, if you throw money at the wall, it will stick. Literally throw the money out there to anybody with an idea - a lot of them will go on to create jobs, if not entire new industries.

The economic recovery starts at the bottom. People have to spend money. It starts with people having jobs. An ecosystem that enables thriving new businesses creates jobs. Forget these old-world Wall Street bafoons - they are not our saviour. We should put our recovery (and some money) in the hands of our smart entrepreneurial pool - that will produce results.

My brother, a really smart guy, has long chided that by shipping jobs and manufacturing overseas over the recent decades, the US "no longer makes anything," or, in other words, doesn't contribute but only consumes. While this is of course not 100% true, (we produce a huge portion of the world's food, for instance), there is something to it. He has always said this would lead to a massive depression, if not the ruin of the US.

One metric for what a country produces might be GDP. Will Hutton of THE OBSERVER, LONDON has an excellent article on How to survive the market meltdown that brings this together very well. Hutton suggests that there isn't enough money in the world to pay for the "dark heart of the global financial system" or the US$55 trillion market in credit derivatives: "This is a market more than twice the size of the combined GDP of the US, Japan and the EU."

Try to imagine that: a $55 trillion market now at risk of complete destruction. Even the derivative debt owed by individual institutions stands at nation-wrecking levels. For example, a single bank in Britain, Barclays again, holds more than $2.4 trillion in credit default swaps. This is more than the entire GDP of Great Britain. If all this paper goes bad, there are not enough assets in the entire country to pay it off. And that's just one bank, in one country.

Hang on. This is going to be a bumpy ride.