YES! The good side of the economy!

It's almost horrible, yet somehow very comforting. For the first time ever, poor people are happier than rich people.

How can this be, you ask? Well, it actually makes sense. If you're poor, nothing's changed for you, has it? Life was tough before and it's still tough. In fact, prices are coming down a bit.

But if you're rich, whoa Nellie! You're scared to death - you might lose your job - maybe you invested your big bucks with a shyster - maybe your stocks have tanked. You might become gasp MIDDLE CLASS!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/poor-people-happier-than_b_164772.html

Now of course nobody's talking about the middle class - we working shlumps who go to school, get a job and then work fifty weeks a year fifty hours a week to make ends meet and try to afford a vacation once every five years or so.

We didn't lose anything with Bernie Madoff. Most of us don't have any stocks, except for maybe a 401K through work that's now worthless. Our lives go on as before, except maybe it's becoming less likely that our kids will be able to get the education we had. The other big change is that we're not talking about retirement anymore. We don't expect to retire. Even if we want to. We're going to be working until the day we die and we just hope we can stay healthy and keep going.

Maybe this economy will level out the playing field a little. Maybe it's time we finally realize we're all in this together - and maybe it's time to grow up, reach out and all work together.

Are you listening, Congress?


Thanks to the Huffington Post for this one.

Suing the SEC

Here's a story that may just be the first of many -

Phyllis Molchatsky lost two million dollars she invested with Bernie Madoff. She plans to sue the SEC to get it back.

Molchatsky, who lives in the suburbs of New York City, says she invested everything she had in Madoff's fund through her broker because it seemed steady and safe. It didn't show wild swings either up or down...and her investment seemed a good one. Between 2001 and last year, it nearly doubled. Then she lost everything.

She says the money was supposed to cover her retirement, her adopted son's education, and her own medical bills if her recently diagnosed Parkinson's disease grew worse.

The suit is believed to be the first filed by an investor against the Securities and Exchanges Commission. The argument is that the SEC didn't do its job, didn't oversee what Madoff was doing, even ignored warnings that something was very, very wrong.

Molchatsky's attorney has filed an administrative claim for 1.7 million dollars. The SEC hasn't commented. If they refuse, a lawsuit will be next.

Experts expect the SEC to claim sovereign immunity. That's a holdover from a monarchy that basically claims The sovereign can do no wrong.

That's clearly an outdated notion.


http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=1109949

*UPDATE* Let the Games Begin - Second Depression II-

Our roving boy has been found - here's the background, or skip to the end if you know it already:

As the ripples from Bernie Madoff's scam become a tsunami washing over global investors and carrying away their money, as the body of a European financier is removed from his Manhattan office, here's a little slice of reality from the BBC. They're watching.

38 year old Marcus Schrenker is missing after his plane crashed. It appears he did it to fake his own death.

Schrenker's financial management companies are in trouble. They're under investigation and are said to owe half a million dollars to an insurance company.

He took off in a single engine plane from a small Indiana airport this past weekend, bound for Florida. He was alone. Somewhere over Alabama, he made a distress call. His windshield, he said, had imploded and he was bleeding.

The rescue effort began - apparently a little more quickly than Mr. Schrenker anticipated. Military planes intercepted his little Piper and found it on autopilot, with the door hanging open. No pilot.

It soon crashed into an Alabama swamp, near a neighborhood. Police say there was no blood, no pilot, and no smashed windshield.

But our hero isn't totally missing - a man matching his description checked into an Alabama motel and explained his appearance as the result of a canoeing accident. He later was seen running off into the woods.

Do they have alligators in Alabama?

Apparently if they do, he dodged them, too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7829868.stm

Spread the Word

The latest fiscal recovery package could be weeks, or even months, away. Major employers are cutting back - there are rumors that IBM will cut 16 thousand people nationwide later this month. Foreclosures are increasing, people offered new jobs hesitate, weighing security versus advancement. Minimum wage employers in New York City aren't hiring anyone who isn't available on the spot. Need to give two weeks notice to your employer? Sorry, there are a dozen others who want the job right now.

When everything hits the fan, we turn to each other. Even the most solitary among us crawls out of her 2 BR 2 BA hermitage and looks around at her fellow humans - "Hey - am I the only one who's going through this?"

And as others confirm that yes, they're going through similar trials, the burden eases just a little. We are not alone. And together we can brainstorm ways to cope, to survive and even to improve things.

That's what this blog is about. I want to hear your stories and the stories you've heard and seen firsthand. Studs Terkel chronicled the stories of the Great Depression. We can chronicle this one ourselves.

It will end. But what will the post-depression world look like? Where will we stand on the world stage - will we be a lead , a character actor occasionally drawing indulgent chuckles from the audience or a member of the Greek chorus?

What will our lives be like? We've passed peak oil - the cheap gas we're using today won't last. Will we have a green economy? Will our service economy make the shift back to a manufacturing economy?

Will the class system we've created collapse with the investments of the super-rich? Will the rich who hang on be even more elite?

This is a forum where we can share our thoughts, our fears, our predictions and our stories. Join the discussion, share your stories. Let other people know and invite them in. It's cold out there when you're all alone.

Madoff: The Last Straw For Wall Street?

It seems the days of equating "Wall Street job" with prestige and money are as extinct as the dodo bird. Tell someone you work on Wall Street and if they don't sneer or throw vegetables at you, they're at least going to shake their heads. Thank Bernie Madoff. His 50 billion dollar shell game may be the weight that sinks Wall Street's floundering reputation. Even hardened Wall Streeters are professing shock at the size, scope and audacity of Madoff's scheme. He's taking people down with him, and the Dow is expected to be dragged down as well. It's massive.

There's an angle here no one is talking about for fear of being offensive, but I'm wondering.
Did Madoff have a Jewish connection? Did he take advantage of a cultural sense of loyalty to line his own pockets?

One NY Times article quotes Palm Beach investors with names that seem to indicate Jewish backgrounds. A charity in the Boston area dedicated to preserving Jewish cultural identity has lost everything with the collapse of Madoff's fund. Did Madoff, whose fund was built on exclusivity and reputation, take advantage of connections that leaned heavily toward Jews to build his massive scheme?

And if he did, is this the latest kick in the teeth for people who are just a generation removed from the Holocaust?

What the fall of Bernard Madoff proves is that just because someone knows what they're doing, because they appear successful and even show steady growth, it doesn't mean that you can trust them.

The Jews have a word for people like Bernard Madoff: shyster.