If you’re already past or approaching retirement age, this was probably not a bad move. I fully expect a market carnage in the near future and I don’t really know which way to turn. Penalties for early withdrawal make touching a lot of my retirement impractical, and I could still use more growth anyway. I just hope that when this country finally wakes up and ‘gets it’, that there’s time for the market to recover - assuming there hasn’t been permanent damage to the US by that point.
Some things to consider. The standard advice that the market always eventually rides out economic bumps and recovers is not historically accurate. After the stock market collapse of 1929, it took decades for that kind of investment to return. If you owned stocks in the summer of 1929 and were then wiped out by its collapse in October of that year, you would have not seen the index at those levels again until 1956. We were also lucky that the United States was about to undergo major industrial expansion and had lots of room to grow during that period. I’m not so sure that would be the case next time. There would be a recovery, but a different kind of recovery.
I worry about the debts now, not because I’m a debt hawk, but because the government now seems to have abandoned even the pretense of operating in a fiscally responsible manner. I also find it particularly idiotic that we’re now waging a trade war against our economy’s biggest bankers and investors - at a time when we’re almost inevitably going to need to ask for more foreign money.
The idiots in Manhattan who really, truly believed that this president would be a great economic chief just because of tax cuts and deregulation simply don’t get it. All of those gains are going to be wiped out by this president’s sheer abject idiocy.
The way you make clear what post you’re replying to is by quoting that post. You didn’t so how were any of us to know? (Rhetorical question. No need to answer.)
Back in the day, Uncle Walt took the entire text of a CBS Evening News broadcast and set it to 12-point type, the same size as newspapers use. It covered less than half a page. He concluded and said publicly that anyone who depended on TV news as his only source of finding out what’s going on “is foolish.”
And that was when the networks considered news was a public service, not an income stream.
That is the wise move. Trying to time the market (by selling when you think it will drop) is a documented way to lose more money. (Human nature being what it is, the tendency is to sell after things drop and then start buying again after prices have gone up.)
I rode out three market dips by just staying the course. 2008-2009 was the worst, I lost 42% of my retirement savings - but it recovered in 18 months.
Trump is making overtures about banning bump stocks.
Ok - I’m going to do something really gross and use Fox for my cite, partly out of morbid curiosity to see if they might present this in any constructive way, but then the following jumped out at me right away:
Oh I see - so this is all on Obama, while you, President Rotting Pile of Discarded Liposuction, are the White Knight swooping in to correct all this?
Sure, while it did happen under BO’s watch, it’s not as cut and dryas you’d hoped, Donaldo:
So is NRA putz knuckle Chris Cox going to escort Trump into a room somewhere, again?
Not a cat-owner, but I’m sure it would be in excellent shape if I had one.
And doubly fuck Fox - first site that I’ve seen in a long time with an unsafe internet connection (lock with red line through it)
Trump went golfing during the March For Our Lives marches today, and then tweeted about the attack in France yesterday, but hasn’t said a word about the marches.
Not a single headline on the front page of their website, though there is a bumper at the bottom that sneaks up out of nowhere linking to live coverage of the marches.
Anecdotal: I wondered the same thing, as I make it a point to skip over that channel, but curiosity got the best of me. I literally only tuned in for about 20 seconds, but the main thrust just how professional and well organized everything was. I believe the quote was something along the lines of, “this may have started as grassroots, but there is obviously some big money behind all of this.”
Currently FoxNews.com’s feature story is quite negative on Trump. I check the site daily and I don’t recall anything so anti-Trump being featured so prominently. Could the tides be turning?