The entire financial services industry got a regulatory nastygram from the administration at 2 p.m. today when President Obama unveiled his proposal for financial regulatory reform legislation, urging Congress to pass the package by year's end.

We all know what we're supposed to do during a bear market. But until you've actually been in that situation, you don't really know what it takes to pull the trigger and put real money at risk -- especially at times when every instinct you have is telling you that you're throwing that money away.

I could write this article the usual way -- by showing you how to turn your thousands into millions through investments in solid, well-known companies. Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), for example, has grown by a compound average of 13% annually over the past 20 years, while Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has averaged 28% over the past decade! Not too shabby.

Lehman Brothers was the linchpin, according to Simon Johnson. "When you let Lehman Brothers fail, it brought down a lot of other pieces of the financial system, including most prominently AIG (NYSE: AIG)," the economist said during a recent visit to Fool HQ.