Thursday, December 04, 2008

Kinda Good

I just sucked it up and looked at the current values for two of the major sources of retirement funds for us, worth roughly 45% of the total. I had been using a working assumption that they would be down around 30%, based on what I hear from various sources. From what I see, they're down around 9%. Not good news, but better than I expected. Tomorrow, I'll look at the other 55%.....

5 comments:

Tabor said...

Painful isn't it! The stinking thing is that I think it was the cause of the greed CEO's and hubris of the govt. leadership and the majority of it could have been avoided!

Cerulean Bill said...

That's certainly a significant part of it, but I think that the bulk come from the attitude of allowing growth without limits. It seems to me that in any ecosystem (and I use that term generically), limits are usually beneficial - in the long term if not the short. When we opened up the floodgates on bank expansion and financial manipulations, and did not apply controls to that new growth, we let that ecosystem kill itself.

I suspect the same will be true of an Obama response -- that the tendency will be to swing too far to the 'control' side of the spectrum. His incorporation of Republicans (even if just the moderate ones) in the administration should ameliorate that, but it won't eliminate it.

Cerulean Bill said...

Oh, and looking at the other 55% was sobering -- the total is about 20% down. Not as bad as it could be, but obviously an OUCH moment. Still, I'd rather know than not.

STAG said...

I hear ya buddy....

Cerulean Bill said...

I'm strange that way... I can go in denial for a very long time, but then I just have to know. Of course, every so often reality is WORSE than my fevered imagination.