Sucks to be me
I've been figuring that the US economy is overdue for a fairly spectacular bellyflop onto the rocks of a free™ market© for quite some time now, so I haven't paying much attention to the erratic lurching of the US markets recently. Perhaps I should have been a little more attentive, because even though I'm fairly paranoid about my savings, I'm still twined too deeply into the massive game of two-card monte that is the US stock market.
One of the class benefits I've got is access to some of the lower-hanging fruit from the "make the rich even richer" orchard. In particular, the company I work for has provided me with a large wad of stock options, which were worth about US$5000 about two weeks ago. But today, well, it's not quite the same. Lenin's Tomb had an article (cheerfully titled CRASH) about how the markets were, um, not doing very well, so I decided to go and see how my upper class work benefits were doing. That US$5000 in potential money? No more! It's worth US$3000 today, and the American Imperium hasn't even attacked Iran yet.
I'd imagine that my other stock holdings would not look particularly good right around now. And the annoying thing is that when I was at the peak of my income (at the beginning of the .com boom, before I got cautious and wrote off my opportunities to make multiple millions working for startup companies of dubious merit) I put a large wad of money into stock funds, which immediately became the monetary equivalent of lead balloons, and didn't come back up to what I'd put in until, ahem, November. So if the economy crashes again (and why the hell shouldn't it? You can't base a superpower economy on a real-estate bubble and treasury looting, at least not for very long) I'd fully expect that the value of that stock will go heavily negative again.
Never mind that even if this potential money wasn't evaporating all it would be used for would be to pay for participating in the gougingly expensive American "health care" system (another American system which is being subverted into being a machine to create monsters. I don't blame doctors that much, because If *I* went a quarter million into debt to get trained, I'd lunge after those US$200,000 job offers like a starving bass at a fly (and after you've been paid too damn much money for a while it becomes routine.) No, the monsters being created here are insurance and pharmecutical industry executives, who are perfectly happy to pauperize American citizens so they can get a second or third gold-filled swimming pool, and their pawns in the US government who are perfectly happy to watch the economy sink just as long as they keep getting their payola "campaign contributions",) but it would still be nice to be able to delay the "oh, you've got cancer but you don't have a million dollars for treatment? Sucks to be you!" moment until a couple of years after I retire.