Calculating Risk

Weren't those an electric six weeks? Wall Street reproved itself, pitched a little, and having since righted, is heavenward as before. At close range the loss of worth to one's holdings can be roughly measured as about twenty-five degrees. Pull away to even the beginning of last September, let alone the same month five years ago, and the 2007 correction is lost in the oscillations of a Dow Jones line graph that trends positive. Start as early as when Warren Buffett's finances were not only technically at risk and the matter is reduced to buying and selling for more profit than anticipated.

In accounting one's stocks, there should be a column reserved, if in the mind, for those monies neither saved nor invested but instead sent to Washington, D.C.; marked for sequestration and yet spent, on or off a budget, anyway.

I was given, as a gift for my college graduation, shares in a well-known company that deals in paints and sealants — which, if turned in, could have been traded for a cheap suit at the time. In seven years their value has quadrupled. The little robin's pride of a nest egg of mine is probably close in worth to Social Security withholdings with less than half the ante. My 401k, like everybody else's, is inaccessible outside of an emergency. But it is, by George, really there. The ration of the New Deal, with its promissory literature rewording expropriation into clauses of entitlement, has the consistency of play money.

The American citizen is programmed to receive as much of a bad return as the federal government can manage. Why the prolongation of a moribund result of 1930s socialism? Part power, part obligation, part unfamiliarity with a country that is now majoritarian investor-class. What if an employer tells his company to invest in their place of work because "the goal is to make you rich by the time you retire, even if you are having so much fun that you want to keep on working"? He knows something, and the congressman should listen closely.

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