And I thought I Was Scared Last Week

[unforth]

I've been reading the business section with more care and consideration than at anytime before in my life, and what I've been reading scares the hell out of me. Factoring in that as I type this, the Dow is down 500+ points already today, it looks like we're going to see a week were the Dow drops 25%. In one week. With global markets showing equal or even steeper drops.

I was talking to sapphohestia yesterday, when it occured to me, and I said, that it's odd - when 9/11 happened, we all knew immediately that what we were going through was history happening - that the world would remember that day, our kids would study it in school. To me, this week has felt the same way. We're going to feel the effects of last month, and this week, and probably next week and the months to come, for years. This is going to chage the world, and our lives. This is history happening. But what's scary is, when our kids read about it in they're text books, they'll be able to turn the page and read what happens next. All we can do is wait and watch and hope that nothing worse happens tomorrow. And when I think about what fear, poverty, loss of hope, do to people - when I think about what it took to resurrect our economy the last time there was this great a financial disaster - I'm scared, and very sad. But we just don't know - the million (billion? trillion?)dollar question - what next? History is way less fun to live than it is to read.

Comments

[skygawker.livejournal.com]

Yeah...explains why it's such a curse to say, "May you live in the most interesting of times."

Life is sure interesting these days.

[galiyah.livejournal.com]

I'm with you, though I'm also hoping that this is a very minor footnote in history. Very minor.

[ultimabaka.livejournal.com]

I've been apt to say that the smartest people in the world work in finance just as a matter of the nature of the beast...dumb people tend to get killed off. That, in a nutshell, is what is happening here....the dumb are simply Darwining themselves out of the wall street gene pool.

On that note, living this history is an amazing thing. Between my chronicles of the disaster in my lj and the day-to-day lunacy I see in front of me on my four monitors every day, I must say, it really is something to behold. Even if my 401k only objects and goes down as I put money into it...

Retirement is for suckers anyway *huggle*
-- Gerardo

[schenker28.livejournal.com]

I'm just happy because I think it will make my students a bit more interested in their "neural network economic prediction" project coming up next month... I've been planning it since last spring, but now it seems even more relevant...