For only the sixth time in its history, the Dow Jones lost more than 500 points today, dropping about 3% of its value. This is small potatoes compared to Black Monday in which it lost 22% of its value in 1987. Some of the other big drops were related to political fears such as the outbreak of War in Europe in 1914 and the 9-11 attack in 2001.
I called the children and assured them that we had lost not one penny in the crash, so I see no great change in the ability to pay tuition. We didn't lose anything on Black Monday in 1987, either. In fact, we haven't had any stocks since the kids were young in the early eighties.
I was born with stock. My grandmother used to say, "There are shanty town Irish and silk stocking Irish, but we're stock and bond Irish." She also used to tell me the first investment was in education, because when the market crashed, no one could take away the education.
I got rid of the stock I had inherited (and the very little I bought on my own) because I was suing corporations. I did not want any issue that I had a conflict of interest by keeping stock in companies I may want to sue. Beyond that, an incipient ill-informed Marxism made it harder and harder for me to own that stock.
I was a naive quite conservative Texas Democrat when I showed up in Chile in 1972. ITT's involvement in undermining and eventually murdering Salvador Allende was a story that unfolded both while I was there and then over the years. It was not the sort of thing to give you a warm and cuddly feeling about the corporations, and this was before I heard of the likely Heinrich Himmler connection to ITT. The more I saw of corporations, the more absolutely evil they looked to me. Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster pretty well sealed it in 1984.
Besides, I've always managed to spend about 110% of my income, no matter how high or low it is. It is helpful to be morally opposed to investing in stock when you can't make yourself save money anyway.
The kids are well-educated, though. So today I am gratified that I have not taken the foolish course of investing for retirement or our old age. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
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9 comments:
Hooray for shorting! You can make money and insult corporations at the same time. But I guess you'd still have the conflict issues.
What disturbs me is the fact that the government has become the corporations, and certainly vice versa. With all the bailouts, we are nationalizing risk and privatizing profit; corporations used to rationalize their profits by the risk they took to achieve them, now the risk is shifted to the taxpayers who also have to struggle to afford the prices (including profits) that corporations charge. Fundamental change in the structure of capitalism, as I see it. bobd
"What disturbs me is the fact that the government has become the corporations, and certainly vice versa."
Huh. I believe Benito Mussolini called this arrangement Fascism.
Do the government retirement funds invest in any public corporations?
Wonder why they bailed out fan and fred? Those waskely evil corpowations.
Becky, careful, shorting is like betting the don't pass line. There's a reason why the odds are long. Betting for failure usually results in just that.
I'm not the shorter; my hubby is. He's kind of a stock nerd and knows the risk. He made a lot yesterday, and I didn't. My conservativeness balances us out, though.
These are the days of opportunity to reevaluate the two-party system. Are we forced to eat the pablem spoon fed to us?
It's Obvious some will, (most) will take it from the top on down to the local level.
Back to ecclesiastes for this comfort.
Maybe it's just a day in the life of a border-town soul.
...in addition, this community is divided at a single party level. No one will pay attention to our
boring novella hence the vultures and what is left behind.
Istanbul is a border town also. Similar problems I suppose. That "nothing new under the sun" shines right through to the big B'town growing pains, seems almost prophetic.
Greed and Envy feed the lifeblood of our circumstances. Most profit off the poor and ignorant while courting the vote.
I see folks getting all riled up over the Obama-Mac'ain match-up... a diversion to keep their minds off the local problems by the local powers that are our leaders.
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