" (Campbell's soup, official sponsor of the NFL, the biggest money-earning sport in the world) "

" I mean in general, from the POV of the security of a whole nation. The economy of a whole nation should be based on something more secure than the moods and whims of investors. It may have worked for some folks for years, but we don't know if the current situation is just a larger-than-usual hiccup, or a significant paradigm shift, a major sea-change.

So maybe things will level out -- maybe, and I hope they do. But maybe we are headed for rough sailing while a whole new world economic order has to take the place of the flimsy one on which we've been cruising for a long time. "

" Well, I disagree slightly FG as I have had investor confidence for quite some time. I h/b investing in 'thin air' since I have had to nickels to rub together and have seen the benefits of aggresive investing while we are young. We have assets beyond our means because of it. Heck, when I needed a new car as I had had my old one for 17 yrs, I pd 35K in CASH! Granted the dot.com scare was pretty bad as was this past one. But here is a stock tip for ya free of charge: when the market crashed recently, ALL stocks had lost except one - Campbells Soup. So what did I do? I bought their stock and it has already increased. Holding bucks close sounds safe but when u retire u will wish you had taken at least 100 bucks and played with it somewhat...

food for thought is all... "

" To me what's scary is having it so baldly shown that our whole economy is built on thin air. Long ago, our money was based on the gold standard. When that went out, we based our economy on "American productivity" -- still a little iffy, but at least it's a tangible thing. But now our economy is based on "investor Confidence." What's that? What kind of thing is that on which to build a nation's economy? It's thin air, and the only thing surprising is that the money charletans were able to hold it up so long before the whole house of cards started to fall.

I don't have the solution, but we need to base our economy on something REAL -- no more of this castle built on air. "