Obama didn’t become president after the DOW closed. He was sworn in midday.

“You’re still just a naive little kid, Jaim. A kid who chose to run away from his problems and who is still afraid to confront them. It’s kind of pathetic. I pity you.”

Translation: “Waaaaahhhhh!”

Um, a vast majority of the fall from 14K took place under George W. Bush, asshat. Learn to read graphs, k?

As for my “problems,” I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Unlike you, I don’t wet my pants and hide under the bed and cower in fear of brown people.

The DOW closed at 8281 the day before Obama was sworn in. Today it closed at 8185. That’s not ‘up somewhat’. It’s not up at all. Your cheering about a stabilization from a market that went into a nearly unprecedented precipitous free fall shortly after he took office is a bit premature.

You’re still just a naive little kid, Jaim. A kid who chose to run away from his problems and who is still afraid to confront them. It’s kind of pathetic. I pity you.

Posting here every day with the same monotonous rail against the Republican party is the highlight of your day.

Oh, that right — because you’re a racist, hypocritical idiot.

Fair, though I’d attribute it to heavily reinforced basic human nature.

Basic human nature.

(But, yes, there were anti-Chicken Little’s about on both sides adding to it.)

And I wonder where they got an idea like that from?

How can you say you were prescient enough to see the housing market crisis, so you took the effort to sell your house and move to another less expensive location, but then claim it was too much of a pain in the ass to liquidate your stock holdings in your 401k, something that should take no more effort than a few posts here?

You no more truly saw this coming than the man in the moon, it’s just easy to look back and see how obvious it was. You liked seeing the value of your portfolio going up and you thought if something were to go bad, you’d be able to get out in time without too much damage. Like about 99.9% of the rest of the people who had money invested in the stock market.

No, actually, I diversified my portfolio and started keeping quite a bit of cash. But cashing out a 401k stock portfolio is a pain in the a$$, and I have a long-term outlook so I can afford a short-term loss in the hopes that the market will recover.

Also sold my house in Massachusetts just before the housing bubble burst and moved somewhere with a much lower cost of living. So yeah, saw this one coming.

I’m not shifting the blame to anyone – I’m laying it squarely at the feet of those who caused the problem. (I give you a clue – it wasn’t me and my piddling little 401k.) In case you haven’t noticed, the entire effing economy has tanked. This means, for example, that a small college in Appalachia that offers a free education to economically disadvantaged students has to take a 25% cut in its operating budget. And yeah, I blame the asinine big-shots on Wall Street who believed that the bottom line was the only good, and that cooking the books was a brilliant idea as long as it garnered ridiculous bonuses and kept the stock price high.

So… stupid or lying?

The collapse in the stock market started before Obama was elected. And since he was sworn in, it has gained more than 1000 points.

And you still claim investors don’t like Obama.

By the way, the only poll that really matters happened on November 4th. Although the recent poll in New York also mattered.

You’re the dipshit, S Quaker. If you saw it coming as you claim you did, putting money in CDs and MMF’s at 1% is a hell of a lot better than taking a nosedive in your portfolio’s value. You can say you had a hunch the bubble was going to burst, but if you truly believed it, you’d have sought some advice from someone and allocated it away from riskier stocks.

How can you logically claim that you knew the stock market was a bubble about to burst but that stocks were the only ‘realistic choice’?

Just doesn’t make sense.

You did have a choice, you chose to remain in stocks even though you feared a disaster. You shift the blame to someone else and refuse to admit you made mistakes too.

Would you like to keep arguing tiny pieces of this argument to strengthen your case, or would you rather try to discuss reality as it actually is so we can get somewhere?

No one is saying they have no choice, but that they don’t have any good choices. Most people’s options over the past decade were:

1) Save nothing.
2) Save through 401k, take the employer contribution and stuff it into a less than inflation yield money market fund and not have the real value of your plan shrink every year.
3) Save through 401k, take the employer contribution and invest in the stock market and hope the historic 8%-12% annual returns hold up so that you have a worthwhile amount of money at retirement.

Few people have the time or education to weigh what combination of those options they should choose, and to most people the only viable one is option 3. Put it in the market and hope that over 30-40 years the history of the market continues.

The problem is that workers with no investment experience and no reason to have to know how to invest were backed into a corner where the only viable retirement option they had was to speculate with it on a market that turned out to be largely fraudulent.

If people are angry at this, they have every right to be.

No, dipshit. I’m saying that I had no realisitc choice but to invest my retirement portfolio in the market1. In case you haven’t noticed, interest paid out on CDs and Money Market funds has been abyssmal as the fed has tried to keep the economy rolling along by lowering interest rates and encouraging consumer debt.

You accused me of being a hypocrite for investing in the stock market and having the audacity to criticize Wall Street while doing so. I merely pointed out that it is next to impossible for the average American these days to avoid investing in the stock market.

And there is no fallacy in my statement that I knew the market was overvalued and yet chose to stay invested. I sold some stocks that seemed inflated a while back – including AIG. I have the luxury of hanging on to my investments until this thing turns around. But I’ve been very conservative and careful with my investments for the last several years because I could see what was on the horizon.

It’s called rational decision making.

You’re missing the part where people don’t really know enough to be handling their own investments and where pretty much every visible expert on the planet were playing up the pure awesomeness of the stock market.

I didn’t miss that part. If you don’t know enough to be handling your own investments, and I’m assuming you mean the stock market, put it in a government money market fund or a short term quality bond fund. And like I said to Southern Quaker, if you listened to the experts who told you how awesome the stock market was and you invested in stocks even though you thought it was a bubble about to burst, why did you do it? Where’s tjhe logic in that action? He and Rheinhard are saying they didn’t have a choice, but I find that extremely hard to believe.

Dennis, I’m going to allow Rheinhard to respond to you,= from the very post you’re trying to criticize.

Never mind whether these people had ever invested a dime before, or whether they understood how mutual funds work, or exactly what types of investments the funds available to them were involved in: get out there and hand your paycheck over to Wall Street you slackers!!

You’re missing the part where people don’t really know enough to be handling their own investments and where pretty much every visible expert on the planet were playing up the pure awesomeness of the stock market.

Could people have found a better investment strategy? Yes.

Is it reasonable to expect everyone in America to know enough about investment to manage their retirement plan effectively? I don’t know, but my feeling is no, it’s absolutely not.

Rheinhard, I don’t know the specifics of your company plan, but I’d be very surprised if yours was such that you didn’t have a cash option or a fixed income option.

Are you seriously telling me you had no choice in how your 401K and IRA funds were invested? You don’t have a fixed income choice, or a money market option? And how is that projecting to point out the fallacy in your statement that you knew where the market was headed yet remained in the market?

“If you never believed the bubble and that it was built on obscene corporate profits and a decline in real wages for the working stiffs who built this country, then why the hell were you invested in the stock market?”

Because, you moronic ass-clown, WE HAVE BEEN LEFT WITH NO OTHER CHOICE. Traditional pension plans have been all but abolished except in either those eeeeeeevil unionized shops with all their unreasonable demands that the union members be able to retire in some measure of comfort, and in various professional fields requiring fairly skilled labor (and even in these, one is expected not to rely strictly on the pension plan to fund one’s own retirement, but that one should still contribute to a 401K as well).

The 401K was a specialized tax loophole initially created for the benefit of well-compensated executives and others who wanted to shield more of their money from income tax. But the business world soon saw this as something different: an escape clause from having to maintain all those annoying pension funds with all that sweet cash the CEO overlords couldn’t dip into when the coke and hooker supply was running low. So pretty soon, companies dropped traditional pensions right and left (and started all sorts of lovely anti-union propaganda where they couldn’t, see current auto industry complaints) and forced all their employees at all education levels to use these new 401Ks. Never mind whether these people had ever invested a dime before, or whether they understood how mutual funds work, or exactly what types of investments the funds available to them were involved in: get out there and hand your paycheck over to Wall Street you slackers!!

Naturally with all this cash being funneled in by hook or by crook, Wall Street had a field day. Oh look, stock prices are rising 10% per year! We must be financial geniuses!

Every person in America should watch the FRONTLINE from a few years ago about the birth of the 401K. My favorite line there was from a banker who was initially in favor of them but came to oppose them when he understood how they were being used for the great majority of Americans who didn’t understand them and for whom they weren’t intended. To demonstrate the silliness of expecting every janitor and truck driver to become an “investor”, he tells a story of talking to a big CEO as a young intern came in and served them coffee. When the intern left, he asked the CEO “Would you let that guy manage your 401k investments?” Of course the CEO spluttered in horror. “But”, replied the banker, “you expect him to manage his own.”

I am a highly educated professional. I am interested in orbit algorithms and physics; I am almost totally uninterested in finance. I get statements from various funds my IRA is invested in and my eyes glaze over reading them. For me, orbital mechanics is a lot simpler than understanding what some of these things do. I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH THAT. I would LOVE to be able to simply work at the things I am good at professionally, and just have a traditional pension I knew I could count on when I retired. I don’t want to have to deal with investment and 401Ks. But I know that as things stand, if I am to have a hope of having a comfortable retirement, I have NO OTHER CHOICE.

I never said I was against the market, merely that I didn’t buy into the fairy tale that the record growth of the last two decades would continue indefinitely, particularly after Bush decided to cut taxes while simultaneously trying to fight a war on two fronts.

I had little choice in the matter, actually, since employee pension plans have been largely replaced with 401k and IRAs.

I tend to invest conservatively and in mostly green funds. My time-frame is long, so I’m banking on the historic growth of the market rather than the insane profits we’ve seen over the last few years. Of course, modern corporations have no such long-term outlook, and look to maximize the apparent worth of the company at the expense of the health of the company as a whole – and by the company as a whole, I’m including the workers, who’ve seen their real wages fall over the last decades. This has led to a national epidemic of unsustainable consumer debt.

And I fail to see how it is scapegoating to point out that Wall Street has pretty much run this country’s economy into the ground. Them’s just the facts.

This from the man who argued that he couldn’t sell his house because Obama was “talking down the economy.”