The bad news from Silicon Valley

Any college students in Ithica who would like to work for Microsoft - don't laugh, they pay pretty well and have good work environments - don't miss my geeky kid being a geek at the recruiting sell-job.

"Don't stock up on apples to sell on street corners. Don't go out and buy used fedoras so you can look like the old photos. The unemployment rate in the Great Depression was 25%. Don't hold your breath until we reach that point."

BUT I LIKE OLD FEDORAS! I want me a fedora; fedoras are majorly cool.

Stop the fedora hate!

OK, Favog, I apologize! I actually like the look of a guy in a fedora, I admit it. You might have trouble finding a store that stocks them, but hey, maybe you can start a trend! The new start-up! A fedora factory!

But seriously, although the streets are not going to flow with money like they did for a while there, the world isn't ending either. Start-ups will continue to happen, fear not.

Personally I am hoping that the streets don't flow with money again any time soon. I thought it was unhealthy and scary.

Old Susan;
How come any mention that times may get hard are always dismissed with that "The worlds not going to end"? Well duh. Even if the absolute worse happens and we get a depression, Obama, and an energy crisis because we haven't done anything much to prepare for it, and we get a few more wars. Heck, even if the civilization collapses, the world wont end. Duh! Now, microsoft may be hiring, but we can't all work there. and times are getting hard out here in Kansas. Even people who don,t follow the news and don't know much about any financial collapse are talking about layoffs. Guess what, gardening? hunting? livestock raising? They save money and for some of us that is getting pretty dang important. Minimum wage doesn't go far and while I'm still job hunting (so are a lot of others) to replace this and applying to go back to school to make my degree more useful I'm still making minimum wage at less than full time and feeling lucky to have it. So while I'm happy that your world is doing so well, remember that you and your son working for microsoft aren't everyone. From where I am, warnings to be prepared to be more self sufficiont don't look at all unwarrented.

Well, I'm thinking about retirement too, so I sympathize. But you're assuming that the "losses" your parents' friends experienced are permanent. Their portfolios are not worth as much today as they were, say, six months ago.

But this is not, we hope, a static situation. The market was up, and now it's down. We were repeatedly assured that it would never go down, but it did. Now it's down, and everyone seems to think that's permanent, but it will go up again. That's what markets do.

It's a little early, that's all, to project with absolute certainty a future of wretched health-endangered poverty in the slums, decades into the future no less, for the people holding these portfolios. Bad things can happen, and some bad things certainly will happen, but perhaps before we completely panic we should wait a bit and see how things shake out.

No one is against gardening. I have a garden myself. No one is against hunting except me, and that's just because I'm such a bad shot. I can't keep too much "livestock" in my urban yard, but if you have room for chickens or something, please, it's probably a good idea, especially if you refer healthy eggs to those thin-shelled factory-produced things you buy in the store. The crowd here who wants to stock up on semi-automatic weapons so they can mow down the crazed mobs of starving urbanites who will be arriving at their door any minute now? That might just be a little off the top, yes?

Batten down the hatches, but don't despair. Stop using credit cards, and if you have a balance, pay it off. If you can't afford something, don't buy it. Ignore the nutjob newspaper articles that say that it's our patriotic duty to go into even more debt to buy even more junk we don't need. Cook. It's cheaper than prepared foods, and better for you, and if you can grow some of the raw materials, better yet. Like that. We're all going to be OK, that's all I'm saying.

Mike, could happen. You're absolutely right. A lot of things could happen, and some of them will.

It's too early to call this one, though. I'm just arguing for a more-or-less hopeful wait-and-see rather than stocking up on despair.

Almost no one is being forced to retire this very instant. Most people have a year or two, at least, of running room, and most of us are taking it. (I'm 63.) There are very few good reasons for just taking all your money out of the market all in one blow right now this minute, and retirement isn't one of them. If you are gravely ill and you need the money, OK, but then, you're probably not going to survive into a 25 year retirement, yes? That kind of question.

I don't want to take money from my kids. Keep your money. Spend it on my grandkids, spend it on yourselves. We're just fine here, we're going to strap down everything loose and assume that the storm will pass. That outcome is at least as likely as the doom-and-gloom, market-takes-twenty-years-to-recover, stock-up-on-ammo scenario.

Correction. I can't believe the 200,000 number came off my fingers. It was bad but not that bad. The real number in Silicon Valley was 40,000.

I feel better now.