black monday
I’m in transit today, cars, buses, planes – no trains yet — and hopefully my truck at the end for the final leg. This means I’m wandering airport corridors barraged by TV’s hanging overhead every thirty feet or so for the traveler in need of a constant IV drip of fast breaking news, an electron lifeline to the events of the day. Today we’re watching the stock market swooning, the Dow Jones down now by over 600 points, all our winnings at the national crap table lost in one throw of the dice.
Standard and Poor, that exemplar of a ratings agency, downgraded the U.S. from Triple A to AA+ and now the institutional investors are dumping equities like they were toxic drums of pesticides the EPA just banned. If you’re like me, you got some skin the game. Enough to hurt if you’re hoping to retire some golden day. Probably not gonna be as soon as we thought….
I suppose we can be grateful our paltry Social Security isn’t pegged to the Market. Although I know plenty of folks who would love to gamble that too, the same folks who want an ATM machine in the casino for easy access to more money. Those people should take an early retirement and head straight to the nearest betting mecca, rent a motel room by the month nearby and put their severance check on the Red Seven and spin the wheel.
I guess I’m not much of a gambler. And when this rollercoaster market steadies out, I’m going to gather up my losses and what’s left of the shirt on my back and hunker down for a long hard run toward old age. The Young Turks of Wall Street are going to have to continue without me. When I watch a ratings agency like Standard and very Poor make a two trillion dollar math error on their downgrade assessment, my faith in capitalism drops way below a Double A+. These were the fine fellows who gave Top Drawer ratings to Enron and WAMU and all the other fast buck subprime freddies and sold us down the river 3 years ago. Maybe math ought to be the criterion, not card counting. It’s supposed to be Wall Street, not Las Vegas.
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