I stopped by my Newburyport mutual savings bank, which I call one of our Newburyport community banks, and it was business as usual. I asked if they were giving out mortgages, and Yup, yes they most surely are.

And I am so grateful that I have my mortgage with one of the local community banks. Which is what I told them.

One of the perplexing things about this financial crisis, is that institutions that are having trouble don’t know what kind of mortgages they have.

That is because their mortgages have been sold and resold.

And one of the things that I like about our Newburyport banks, and I’ve said this before, is that they are local in the best sense. They know exactly what mortgages they have, and who they lent them to. They do NOT sell them. They keep them, and they make money off them.

They are in great shape.

Responsibility, accountability, commonsense, fiscally sound. Not to repeat myself, but to repeat myself, that’s one great example for the situation that we as a country find ourselves in.

And part of me even hesitates to blog during a financial crisis as big as the one that we are experiencing at the moment. I just could not believe it when the House of Representatives did not pass the rescue bill yesterday and the DOW dropped almost 800 points. Yikes!

And someone described the situation to me this way. It’s a credit problem (one which our Newburyport banks are not experiencing, but obviously one which a lot of others banks are). It’s as if someone turned the water on the water spout, off or down to a trickle so the vegetation could not get any water. Consequences not so good.

It would mean that small business could have problems getting credit for their payroll. Not only might the businesses not grow, they may not be able to pay employees and jobs could be lost.

It could be difficult to get credit for cars, homes, a college education. People’s retirement could be at risk.

So this rescue bill if it does NOT pass, could effect all of us.

I’ve contacted my Representative John Tierney who voted against this bill, and asked him the next time round, in no uncertain terms, to get the thing done and vote for it.