Putting losses in perspective

Thursday, 12 March 2009 18:00

AIG Bailout AIG Payout  <		>   Market Rise

It’s been a rough time for all of us this past year, but let’s put things in perspective America. Most of us lose our 401Ks and other investment accounts in the hundreds of thousands, but for a moment, imagine having billions and losing it (only to be left with millions). While most of us never had that much to lose to begin with, billionaires on the other hand, lose billions; that’s more than most of us make or save put together many times over. So you see, this economy has hurt the rich and the ultra super rich as well. In fact, they’ve lost more money than we ever could imagine losing. According to a Forbes article we only have 793 billionaires from a whopping 1,125 billionaires only a year ago. That is 30% reduction! Yes, 30%. No, I don’t think it’s quite clear yet.

Let’s say each of these poor billionaires lost around 2.5 billion. Accounting for the depreciation in the number of billionaires we have 332 victims (billionaires) of this current financial disaster. Now multiplying the losses each of these billionaires suffered, we get 830 billion. So what you say. Well look at it like this: assume that each one of us (non-billionaires), lost only 500K including all the money we’ve saved up, put away, stuffed under our beds and, well, you get the point. Now, let’s say a million of us lost that same tiny, little sum that we think we’re going to retire on. Doing the math again, all of us (non-billionaires) lost 500 billion. That is still 330 billion dollars less than what (former) billionaires lost put together! This is money to wipe out another nearly another million retirement funds! So you see, we hardly have it as bad as those super-ultra rich former billionaires. And that doesn’t even account for the billions lost by those who are still billionaires (my head is starting to spin)!

So, instead of getting butt hurt about losing those few hundreds and thousands, just look at the math. It makes perfect sense - at least when the market (and our brokers) were running numbers the same way a few months ago, it made complete sense. So you see, we really need to support our bankers and executives who’ve taken the hardest hit from the financial time bomb. The casualties are high, there is no time to lose, join Support Our Bankers (SOB) now.



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