For the millions of Americans sucked into the cesspool of the stock market, last Thursday was one of those Holy Jesus what happened moments. In less than an hour the market lost 1 trillion dollars, only to regain almost 2/3 of the losses late in the day.
So what about the 1/3 of a trillion lost? It was consumers who took it on the chin. The consumers who had entrusted their money to highly paid advisers of their 401Ks and their IRAs lost, and lost big.
Now you say, maybe they gambled, maybe they put their money in risky exotic sounding investments. But no, they didn’t. They did as they were told by the “professionals”. The reality is they lost money the good old fashioned way – they trusted the system and the system ripped them off.
So a week later, our so-called regulators at the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) the people who are supposed to protect us – are still trying to figure out what went wrong.
Hold on right there. Are they really saying they don’t know how or why our money was lost? Yes, take a deep breath and maybe even a stiff drink and listen to what the government experts say caused America to lose so big.
Mary L. Schapiro, the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, emphasized that their investigation had not yet settled on a single cause for Thursday’s volatile trading, and that numerous factors could have contributed. Yikes! Did she really say she was clueless?
Worse, the SEC chairman said the enormous increase in trading volume in recent years was complicating efforts to draw clear conclusions about the plunge.
NO. No don’t tell us the market is too complicated to figure out how we all got suckered.
Remember all the paid pundits, the guys that shill for the market (yes, Cramer, that’s you) who have told us all along that Wall Street has safeguards built into the market in the form of circuit breakers that prevent crashes. That is all a lie. Only a portion of exchanges have those protections.
Let a professor break it all down for you. “The normal stabilizers were pushed out by the systems glitches.” Yes, you all lost savings due to a “glitch”.
Do you feel reassured, is the drink kicking in? You lost and you don’t even get an “I’m sorry” from your financial adviser (who yes, will keep the fee he charged you for his services last year), much less an “I’m sorry, I’m resigning, I’m so ashamed”, from the head of the SEC who let all this happen.
Bottom line, be very afraid. You are at great risk and no one is telling you anything will change. You just took a beating and you don’t even know who or what hit you. At any time you could get hit again. So is your mattress looking like a safe place for your savings?
Let the pros convince you that their con game is worth the risk.
With no regulation of the industry who are we to trust? If consumers are left to the mercy of the market how can we be expected to save anything? Thanks for the article .
So we bail out Wall street and they still rob us.Thanks, I will pass on the blog.