The Mailer That Put the Final Nail in the McCain Campaign Coffin

[Richardo]

Source: Huffington Post

Close to 100 million Americans either received mailers last week or will be receiving them next week. It is these mailers that will put the last nail in the coffin of the McCain Palin campaign.

It wasn't sent by Obama, nor by 527 group, not by any non-profit or even a political organization.

<snip>

The first envelope I received, for my son, was a quarterly mutual fund report -- where we have most of his college savings. The letter reported that since the beginning of the year, the savings were down over 30% -- even though the fund was a "blend" fund.

The next envelope, which I received on Friday, was a quarterly report on my IRA, also down over 30%.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-kall/the-mailer-that-put-the-f_b_133999.html

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Excellent piece by Rob Kall. :patriot:


It IS the economy, stupid. Twas ever thus.

[Mz Pip]

1. We get those

We haven't opened any of them in a couple of weeks. We know it's bad. What more can we do?

[illuminaughty]

2. Great piece. Thanks

[Lasher]

3. This is one reason why McLoser can't change the subject.

People getting reports like that all over the US.

[bluestateguy]

4. I just got my statement

My losses were not that bad, but then again my balance was not that much to begin with, seeing as how the account is only 2 years old.

[obamachangetheworld]

5. This will be B*sh's legacy

along with Iraq, it is a lesson in how NOT to run a country.

[Joe Bacon]

6. Bush promised us an "Ownership Society"

He sure delivered on that! Thanks to President Asshole, all of us are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Except for his pals...

[rcrush]

7. I feel stupid

Not knowing much about this stuff I came into some money and invested $5000 with Edward Jones about 7 months before everything went to shit. I'm gonna leave it cause I intended it to be there for me about 40 years from now but like 30% of it is gone now.

[IsItJustMe]

8. No need to feel stupid. I lost a huge amount of money after 9/11 in the stock market. After that,

I took it all out and said never again. As far as I am concerned, you are only stupid if you keep repeating the same mistake. The stock market, to me anyway, is like gambling. It goes up, and it goes down.

[Baby Snooks]

9. Imagine your social security being handled by these wizards...

And yet that is what Bush wanted. To privatize social security. This is one reason why no one in Congress should ever even consider it. Social Security and Medicare are like FDIC insurance and T_bills. Sure things. Guaranteed by the government. Social Security in particular was no tmeant to be handled by some flippant 25 year old manager on Wall Street who doesn't really know what they're doing and doesn't really care. Some people were lucky and had some flexiblity in their plans and started selling off their equities the second time the Dow Jones went under 11,000. So they have everything tied up in cash. Hard to lose cash. So far anyway.

Others have not been so lucky. And as the employees of Enron were told, they will told, there are no guarantees. Too bad. Tough luck. Go back to work. The Enron employees may get lucky after all the dust from all the lawsuits settles. They may not. Bottom line is 401-K plans that you turn over to someone else and that restrict your ability to move the assets around are quite dangerous. No one learned a thing from Enron.

[Technowitch]

10. 30% sounds about right

That's roughly how much we've lost -- and we have kept to strictly safe/conservative (in the financial sense) investments for the last several years.

It's been painful to watch. There are so many discretionary things we were thinking about spending money on, and that's pretty much over.

Unfortunately the "don't want to spend because it's not safe to do so" consumer sentiment is going to be a huge drag on the market, too. People are going to put off buying cars, appliances, computers, you name it.