MAKING big MONEY
I’ve been scratching my hatless head lately trying to get a handle on why on god’s green earth everyone I know is money crazy. A decade or so back we had that day trading stock market frenzy, folks figuring they’d just sit home in their skivvies and become millionaires by selling short, buying fast and basically outthinking the Big Boyz. They were like card-counters in Vegas, but no pitbosses to stop them when the winning streak started. Works great when the bubble is expanding, not so good when the bubble pops.
I had a friend who day traded back when. Stuff was going through the roof. She was pretty sure she was going to get rich. To me she was already rich. She explained to me, slow as child with a plastic teether stuck in my face, it was all relative. Meaning, she didn’t have to tell me, I was neither bright nor rich. She needed more. Much more than me. And by god, she was going to get her fair share.
Over the years the tech stocks plunged, the markets have ‘corrected’, the savings and loans have debacled, the silver bubble burst after we’d melted all our dinnerware down for cash, the great recession is still with us and today, a dark day on the market, the dow dropped over 500 points. The rich got a little poorer. And the poor? Well, they’re like me, too stupid, I guess, to know the difference. Or so the big boyz think.
I will say even the folks I know without portfolio, stocks or otherwise, seem to believe, deep down in their rumbling bellies, that riches may actually lie right over the horizon. The kids in the ghettos think the NBA will make millionaires of them, with 5 carat diamond studs in their noses, and my friends in the hood here on the South End fantasize about their lotto winnings. People are buying gold, silver, stocks and bonds now that the real estate bubble burst.
Up in Congress they’re taking knives to the budget, to government jobs, entitlements, to anything that remotely smacks of socialism to them. Capitalism, they preach, is the only religion. Let them alone, keep their taxes low and they’ll make so much money there will be plenty not only to trickle down but to rain on us like manna. We sorely want to believe them. Even disaster after disaster. The only thing I know, the rich are doing okay. The rest of us, maybe we ought to quit thinking we’re going to outsmart the Big Boyz. They made all the rules, so you know, the game is rigged in their favor. How many times you got to roll snake eyes to figure that out? They just want you to keep playing….. Me, I’m thinking of cornering the banjo commodities. That, or audition for American Idol. Not real good odds, but hey, they’re looking better than the odds of finding a job.
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