There may be a little ray of sunshine in the unmitigated financial disaster that has befallen the American people, a disaster brought on by greed and complete failure of our federal government to oversee the runaway train called Wall Street.

The roots of all of this stems from the U.S. airline deregulation act approved in 1978. From there, the term deregulation took on a life and an ethic of its own. Business and Republicans pushed and pushed the envelope across the economic perspective until in culminated in the mortgage crisis that caused the greatest freefall at least since the Great Depression.

It is not helped here by the three week and counting Boeing strike.

Condo sales in Ballard have slipped a bit and up to 15 percent in West Seattle, according to Northwest Multiple Listing figures for August - even before the major impact of the national crisis we are now experiencing. For sale signs are popping up in droves, not necessarily a bad thing, but the problem is the signs seem to stay on the street for a lot longer. Optimism the waning.

Gas prices are leveling, even going down a bit, but they will creep up again soon. Buses are more and more crowded and King County Executive Ron Sims and the folks at Metro have promised more buses more often but the catch is the fare price is going to go up at least 50 cents during the next several months. That has prompted some on the lower ends of the economic scale to ride bikes more and walk more, not necessarily a bad thing, but with winter coming . . . ?

Altogether a rather drab set of prospects, and we have only touched the surface of woes. So, where is this "little ray of sunshine"?

The crisis appears to have one major effect on the near-term economic future of our city. It is pushing down home prices, with a secondary pressure on the rental market.

Good news for those who are feeling stressed over the way prices have been skyrocketing. We have often said we were concerned about the city's future if the people who do the basic service jobs needed for business to function cannot afford to live here or to commute from less pricey suburbs to our neighborhoods.

We wonder whether some of the condos on the drawing board will be built near-term. Will projects go on hiatus, perhaps starved for the essential construction loans? Will this slow the demand and depress prices? We will have to wait and see.

Now before a lot of you bellow loudly - and correctly - that sinking housing prices are bad for a lot of people, maybe even disastrous for many, we said a ray of sunshine, not a bright glorious summer day. It may be more like the weather we had in August, not the sun of the first two weeks of September.

To attack the national problems, we need to get over the common wisdom that regulation is bad no matter what. Then we must have regulators who are led by our political leaders, not suppressed and told to forget the rules, let commerce take its course.

We frankly think it is a bitter pill to see our national debt go up another trillion dollars to bail out a crowd who took home hundreds of millions even when fired from their jobs. We have been led by people who saw greed as a positive thing, so we hope they are left to rot in the hell they created - but politicians seem to bond with strange bedfellows, so we are not all that optimistic.

Our little ray of sunshine is all we can see through the black clouds at this point.

- Jack Mayne