Complex Numbers

FAILboat Now Departing at Dock 13

So today, the DJIA blows past 9,000, heading down to its close at about 8580. The S&P 500 index is flirting with 900.

One year ago today, the Dow closed at 14,165 - highest point ever.

What's that, like, a 40% drop? This is going to make the Great Depression look like a goth kid wannabe.

So let's get this straight: Banks fail, taking everyone else along with it like a sinking battleship drawing sailboats down in its whirlpool. Treasury and Fed both push for a "bailout" which really amounts to the printing of more money, practically guaranteed to hike up inflation. I'm still not entirely sure how that was supposed to help, but I thought it was supposed to help the economy, keep it from going bust, and we HAD to have it RIGHT NOW or things would go straight to hell. THEN they cut the lending rate by 50 basis points, practically guaranteed to encourage banks to borrow from the gov't instead of each other. And things are going straight to hell.

Now, I'm just an engineer, and I don't know squat about high finance, but to me that would be like noticing the skyscraper you just built has silly putty for the foundations, and replacing said silly putty with Astroglide.

We all could use some Astroglide right about now, I think.

Oh, the markets will recover. Hell, I wish I had more free cash lying around right now to mop up the blood in these here streets. Is this as low as it can go? No, it's not. What you're looking at here is called "deleveraging," where a whole lot of money that was in the stock market didn't really exist because it was borrowed - either through margin, short selling, or just plain borrowing and then investing.

There's a whole lot of money out there that doesn't really exist, you know. That's how the system works. I just wish I had more of that nonexistent money.