They're Not Jumping Out of Office Windows, Yet - But...

[Jeannieb43]

Another casualty of this financial depression:

A 45-year-old man, a financial expert holding an MBA degree, who formerly worked for Price Waterhouse and maybe Sony Pictures, but who had now been unemployed for several months, took his own life and that of five other family members last night in their home in Porter Ranch, a suburb of Los Angeles. His suicide note indicated the reason was that he had no means to support his family.

http://cbs2.com/breakingnewsalerts/Porter.Ranch.Murder.2.833728.html

[jasd]

>>They're Not Jumping Out of Office Windows, Yet -<<

Nah, anyone high enough to do damage to his or her self by jumping out a window - has a 'parachute' :-(

[Dr. Shane]

The people that poured their money into the stock market during the Great Depression became super rich after wards. The market survived the Great Depression and it will survive this. I do not want to encourage anyone to put money in the market they cannot afford to lose but anyone that has money to invest, now is a good time to buy stocks in good companies.

[Dr. Shane]

I just checked my portfolio. I am down 15.5% which is almost double from what I was down a couple weeks ago. But... today was a bad day on the market.

[Amelia]

I'm not even looking at mine for the rest of the year.

[carolaa]

Yeah, I read that story and it made me mad. What an idiot and self centered, poor excuse for a human being to kill your whole family. I can't imagine what kind of financial troubles would make a person go to that extreme. I mean, it looked like 2 of the sons were old enough to have part-time jobs. If both parents also worked while the mother-in-law watched the other kids, they should be able to get beyond whatever they were dealing with. But to just kill them all in cold blood. Good thing he killed himself, is all I can say. Coward.

[melvin mccarty]

Well I was there in the 1930s. You may be right that some people profited from that terrible time but then some people win from lotteries also. For everyone that wins in these deals someone else loses. If you want a sure thing just be a broker! mel

[John317]

I think people who do that are just thinking of themselves and of their pride and of the fact that they won't be able to live any more in the same high style. They just think of life as a time to have fun, and when the fun is over, they only think of ending it all. I used to think that way, before I became a Christian. I wanted to die when I was really young, when life was still exciting and fun. Now I see life more from the perspective of service to those for whom Christ died and who are having a hard time in life.

I feel sorry for people like that family. I wonder if someone took the time to study with them about Christ's love and the Judgment and the Second Coming.

[fccool]

I think it's more than that. It's a disconnect with reality. I don't think they are living in a real world, so when their illusionary world tumbles or having trouble... they likewise seek self destruction... because they are heavily depend on that world. What would stock brokers do if the stock market to shut down? What would financial analysts do, when there's nothing to analyze?

I know you might think it's ludicrous to think that a PHD might be out of job. But I've observed many PHDs lining up to trade junk in the flea market just to get food when USSR came down. There simply was no more place for them in the new society. The rules are about to change. People will have to save, there will not be anymore cheap credit as the world will not pay the deficiency anymore. Brazil and Bolivia have just dropped their dependency on the Dollar. Many countries will follow as they see their investments devalue as Bernanke dropping dollars out of the helicopter trying to put out debt fires with more debt.

[rudywoofs (Pam)]

Do any of you know what it's like to not be able to get a job because you are "over-qualified"? People won't hire you because they want someone who will be there long-term. Potential employers see over-qualifications as a liability because the prospective employee *could* use a job as a quick stepping stone to another higher paying job, when in actuality, the prospective employee would just be happy to have a job - any job.

Most out-of-work over-qualified people I know are having a very difficult time making ends meet. Savings only go so far when you have a mortgage to make. And you can only sell so many things on ebay. And these people are not living in high-class fancy housing either. And they are on food stamps because they have NO INCOME.

Don't judge what someone else does or doesn't do until you've walked a mile in their moccasins.

[Amelia]

I'm seeing every day. The newly unemployed due to this crisis are out in droves applying everywhere. Just the other day at one of my stores (which happens to be a Plaid Pantry/76 station) a very nice looking man came in to ask about work and leave a resume. Even though he was in jeans and sport shirt, you could tell he wasn't your every day gas jock nor the usual type that would work convienence stores. I gave one of those raised eyebrow looks to the mgr and he said two words. Over qualified. Which means that he would never even get a chance because as soon as his industry regains strength, he would be gone.

[Woody]

Amelia. In this type of work ... do you actually have most employees staying at their jobs for long periods of time? I just wonder if this reliable, intelligent worker ... might be a real asset for perhaps longer than many of the fly by night immature workers that you might perhaps get many times.

[Dr. Shane]

I don't hire people that ask for more money than what I am going to pay either. A lot of people will come on board for less money but leave as soon as they find a job willing to pay more.

[rudywoofs (Pam)]

Amelia. In this type of work ... do you actually have most employees staying at their jobs for long periods of time? I just wonder if this reliable, intelligent worker ... might be a real asset for perhaps longer than many of the fly by night immature workers that you might perhaps get many times.

exactly...just because someone is over qualified doesn't automatically mean they will abandon their job when/if that "something better" comes along. Some people do have good work ethics and loyalty, y' know.

[Dr. Shane]

OK, now I am down 26.26%. My Exxon Mobile stock really tanked today. Good thing it is only 8.5% of my portfolio.

[Amelia]

Quote:

My Exxon Mobile stock really tanked today

Exxon Mobile........tanked..........

[fccool]

Google up "Level 3 assets" and read up on that, and that's when you will understand why stock market and financial corporate world is in a big doodoo right now, so are pension and retirement funds of many Americans.

[Amelia]

Thanks fccool but I don't really want to be any more depressed than I already am. lol

[Dr. Shane]

OK, let's cool it or I am going to jump out of my office window. Of course my office is in a single story building.

[Amelia]

OK, someone explain this to me. Read the article and then tell me that my money was all in my head. I am confused. I earned money by working. I am paid that money but some was taken out pretax and put into a 401k. My statement comes and alot of my money is gone. Now this article says that money really wasn't there to begin with. Say what? I had it and gave it to you to oversee. Now you say a bunch of it is gone. But since it really wasn't there, I really didn't lose it? If I had something tangeble, how can it now be non-tangeble? How can I have money one day and no money the next without it having gone somewhere or to someone?

Quote:

October 11, 2008

All that money you've lost _ where did it go?

By ERIC CARVIN

Associated Press Writer

Trillions in stock market value — gone. Trillions in retirement savings — gone. A huge chunk of the money you paid for your house, the money you're saving for college, the money your boss needs to make payroll — gone, gone, gone.

Whether you're a stock broker or Joe Six-pack, if you have a 401(k), a mutual fund or a college savings plan, tumbling stock markets and sagging home prices mean you've lost a whole lot of the money that was right there on your account statements just a few months ago.

But if you no longer have that money, who does? The fat cats on Wall Street? Some oil baron in Saudi Arabia? The government of China?

Or is it just — gone?

If you're looking to track down your missing money — figure out who has it now, maybe ask to have it back — you might be disappointed to learn that is was never really money in the first place.

Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, puts it bluntly: The notion that you lose a pile of money whenever the stock market tanks is a "fallacy." He says the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money — it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth.

"It's in people's minds," Shiller explains. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today — who are very, very few people — are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth."

Shiller uses the example of an appraiser who values a house at $350,000, a week after saying it was worth $400,000.

"In a sense, $50,000 just disappeared when he said that," he said. "But it's all in the mind."

Though something, of course, is disappearing as markets and real estate values tumble. Even if a share of stock you own isn't a wad of bills in your wallet, even if the value of your home isn't something you can redeem at will, surely you can lose potential money — that is, the money that would be yours to spend if you sold your house or emptied out your mutual funds right now.

And if you're a few months away from retirement, or hoping to sell your house and buy a smaller one to help pay for your kid's college tuition, this "potential money" is something you're counting on to get by. For people who need cash and need it now, this is as real as money gets, whether or not it meets the technical definition of the word.

Still, you run into trouble when you think of that potential money as being the same thing as the cash in your purse or your checking account.

"That's a big mistake," says Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at Harvard.

There's a key distinction here: While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can.

"You can't enjoy the benefits of your 401(k) if it's disappeared," Jorgenson explains. "If you had it all in financial stocks and they've all gone down by 80 percent — sorry! That is a permanent loss because those folks aren't coming back. We're gonna have a huge shrinkage in the financial sector."

There was a time when nobody had to wonder what happened to the money they used to have. Until paper money was developed in China around the ninth century, money was something solid that had actual value — like a gold coin that was worth whatever that amount of gold was worth, according to Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Denver.

Back then, if the money you once had was suddenly gone, there was a simple reason — you spent it, someone stole it, you dropped it in a field somewhere, or maybe a tornado or some other disaster struck wherever you last put it down.

But these days, a lot of things that have monetary value can't be held in your hand.

If you choose, you can pour most of your money into stocks and track their value in real time on a computer screen, confident that you'll get good money for them when you decide to sell. And you won't be alone — staring at millions of computer screens are other investors who share your confidence that the value of their portfolios will hold up.

But that collective confidence, Jorgenson says, is gone. And when confidence is drained out of a financial system, a lot of investors will decide to sell at any price, and a big chunk of that money you thought your investments were worth simply goes away.

If you once thought your investment portfolio was as good as a suitcase full of twenties, you might suddenly suspect that it's not.

In the process, of course, you're losing wealth. But does that mean someone else must be gaining it? Does the world have some fixed amount of wealth that shifts between people, nations and institutions with the ebb and flow of the economy?

Jorgenson says no — the amount of wealth in the world "simply decreases in a situation like this." And he cautions against assuming that your investment losses mean a gain for someone else — like wealthy stock speculators who try to make money by betting that the market will drop.

"Those folks in general have been losing their shirts at a prodigious rate," he said. "They took a big risk and now they're suffering from the consequences."

"Of course, they had a great life, as long as it lasted."

[Dr. Shane]

I guess a few people standing on their window's ledge climbed back inside today. I wouldn't be surprised is the market falls tomorrow as some investors cash in their profits.