Losing in the stock market costs more than money...

One of the amazing things I've run across in the research and promotion of "Crazyman's Economics" is that people who brag about how much money they've made in the markets don't care about those who lose money. They claim it's their fault they lost their money. They didn't do the proper research, they trusted the wrong people.

Look at the report Wall Street put out earier this week. They said it was human nature that caused investors to be too greedy when things were going well and panic too soon when things got shaky. (Translation: It's not our fault, it was the investors' fault.)

In fact, we've asked dozens of people who made money one question: "Where did your money come from?" Almost every single one of them, from guys in the coffee shop in Veedersburg, IN to afternoon host Tracy Jones on 700 WLW in Cincinnati say the same thing..."I don't care."

But we should care, because the costs of human suffering associated with people losing everything in the markets is an underreported story.

We've heard of daytraders losing everything, 25-year old software company owners being millionaires one day and broke the next, and we shrug our shoulders because they "should have known."

But what about the people who were just trying to provide for their family? Those who wanted a comfortable retirement? Part of our mission is to put a face of common people who did what they thought was the right thing and lost everything. If you know people like Jim, let me know. The more we put faces to Wall Street's wreckage in the pursuit of greed, the more we can force the MSM and Congress to address it.

Jim's story is true and legit, and he is to be commended for being so honest. His is one story. There are millions more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeS77uHv7N0

httP;//www.crazymanseconomics.com

but then the Depression hit. She had gotten the house and enough of a settlement in stocks to support her and my mother after the divorce, but we all know what stocks did.

She and my mother still managed to keep the house and not take in boarders, although they lived on oatmeal 3 times a day for the worst of it. About a third of her stocks survived, and she died a reasonably comfortable woman in the early 50s.

The point to all this is that the real key is debt. My grandmother didn't have it. She didn't believe in buying stocks on margin, no matter what kind of paper profits everyone from elevator operators to plutocrats were crowing about. She figured that unless you owned it, it wasn't yours and it didn't matter what it did. She communicated that to my mother and my mother to me.

I know people who thought they were wealthy and who lost it all because their wealth was from an overvalued house or from a stock like Enron. The former counted on something they really didn't own and the latter counted on just one thing to create and maintain wealth by paper value only.

The playing field is not level and brokers are there to make money for the brokerage. They are told which stocks to pump and the investor isn't told that the particular stocks are being pumped for the benefit of institutional investors, not them, and that they can expect a temporary nosedive before the stock recovers to what it should have sold for all along. It's always best to ask what a stock is earning in dividends and not count on paper value to create wealth. Count on real income.

I don't shrug my shoulders at people who have lost. It's a shark pool and they are told to trust the sharks to keep their heads above water. I wish they would teach this stuff in schools, along with what a mortgage is and what it really costs. That they don't is just delivering more Jims to the sharks.

Welcome to DU. We run your videos at http://worldnewstrust.com

Good, time-honored, southern common sense and populism. Good to see someone is still practicing it.

by its own definition

it just also grants itself an exemption from all moral concerns.