Goodbye, Shareholder Nation

[Newsjock]

Source: Seattle Times
By Jon Talton

Back in the jubilant late 1990s, I wrote one of the first newspaper blogs on the stock market. I called it "Shareholder Nation." It marked what appeared to be the rise of a broad investor middle class (and was where I first wrote these haikus). Average Americans had the opportunities that were once reserved for the very rich and it was going to produce momentous changes. To be sure, there were tradeoffs: Traditional pensions were fading, and Shareholder Nation would be conflicted by its several hats: As investors, employees, customers and citizens.

It turned out to be mostly a sham. To paraphrase an old expression, never confuse a clever blog title with a bull market. Most average investors have been savaged by two speculative bubbles and the secular bear market that is now nearly a decade old. They've learned that they are just along for the ride at a casino rigged against them (flash trading, anyone?), however much your neighbor claims to be a successful day trader or having bought Ford at just the right time. Now many will have to return to work, if they can find jobs, or postpone retirement.

... Unfortunately, most pensions are gone and many employees are stuck in the market whether they like it or not. Companies and governments ignored pension funding during the bull years, and now they want to renege on solemn obligations made to workers. And we the people happily participated in the game as the market was going up, even when it was heavily fueled by mergers that killed jobs and competition, setting up many of today's troubles.

Read more: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/soundeconomywithjontalton/2012701695_goodbye_shareholder_nation.html

[Earth_First]

1. "It turned out to be mostly a sham"

+1

[Curmudgeoness]

2. I always felt that the stock market was a casino game,

and I didn't know the rules. But along with everyone else, I got stuck with what was proposed as no other choice. IRA and 401(k) plans---if you were not in the market, you were "losing money" to inflation. I don't know why I don't go with my gut. My gut has good sense.

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. I noticed that one of the retirement advice deals was still assuming an 8%

return on investments for their projections. These are the same kind of advisors that tell you must have 2 million dollars in the bank in order to survive retirement. That's all another universe as far as all that goes.

[Warpy]

4. Of course it was a sham. Corporations wanted to limit their

liability to long term employees, to be able to cut them loose at retirement instead of paying those pension checks out as long as the employee managed to stay alive, so they swapped over to investment scams instead, with broker fees and just plain mismanagement eating up what a falling stock market didn't in too many cases.

Now people are paying penalties to eat up their retirement savings tied up in those plans because they were cut loose 10 years or more ahead of schedule, long before they could qualify for Social Security and Medicare.

That's why it's no longer a shareholder nation or even a nation of anything but desperate people.

Desperate people are known to resort to some pretty desperate measures. Maybe that's what it takes for a corporation-obsessed government to notice.

[femrap]

5. I read today that the small investor

is selling her/his US mutual fund equity shares like crazy...I think it was Market Watch. Like $131 billion for this year. But the Bond Funds were gaining investment.

So are TPTB getting ready to raise rates so Bonds will collapse? The small guy always gets screwed, it seems.

Vegas has better odds....at least the craps table does.