well most people aren't as wise as you and I - according to the media, the sky is falling and everyone needs to pull their money out now while they still can
the u.s. markets have never in its history had a negative growth over any period of at least 10 years. Manage your investments with long term goals in mind and you'll be fine. Try to daytrade or move stuff around too much and you'll be screwed even in a good economy.
The spread of a more-biased-by-the-day mass media is really a horrible thing for the economy. When they sensationalize little things that happen more frequently than anyone realizes they only create a self-fulfilling economic prophecy. If you tell everyone to pull their money out of their investments because a recession is coming (some say it is here which is all kinds of bullshit), and everyone will and because of that a recession will occur in a situation that, had it been left alone, wouldn't have played out to be any worse than anything else that has happened in the past 20 years.
They did the same thing with gas prices when Ike hit. Katrina destroyed way more oil platforms and had the refineries and the pipelines shut down for longer, but when Katrina hit gas prices didn't go up too much because the media was too busy attacking federal response practices. When Ike, a significantly less catastrophic event, came along, the only big thing they had to talk about was gas supply, so they said gas prices would go up to $5.00. Then everyone goes and buys gas right before and as the refineries and pipelines are shutting down, causing the supplies that there were to be unnaturally taxed and temporarily not replenishable, causing prices to skyrocket due to dwindling supply and above average demand.
It is kind of like traffic. If during rush hour everyone would just go the speed limit, then everyone would go the speed limit. However, there are the jackasses that don't go the speed limit because they are overly cautious mergers or a bush is on fire or some shit, causing things to get fucked up and slow when there is really no need for it to be that way at all.
BREAKING NEWS ALERT: KITTEN RESCUED FROM TREE IN HOBOKEN, NJ
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