One of Venkat's better forwards

First Bear Sterns collapsed. And now Lehman has filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch has sold itself. Most of the world is looking at these events as the collapse of reliable and crucial investment banks. But there is a small subset of people (of which I am one), who are thinking of these events in a different way. These people are the MBAs in non-investment-banking and even non-financial-sector jobs, who are saying "Ah.... those Day Zero bastards are getting what they deserve". I am not proud to entertain such thoughts. But I can't help thinking them.

You see, in MBA courses all over the world, those seriously vying for, and landing I-banking jobs, are like the cocky quarterbacks in the typical high school movie. They are the "cool studs", the ones who are universally considered "gods", and are profiles by newspapers, especially in India, as the ones with a six-figure-foreign placement. As if to rub it in the faces of other "commoner" MBAs, Indian newspapers love to convert the dollar/pound salaries into rupees and report them as "crore-plus" packages. The rest of us meanwhile, get jobs in sales, marketing, IT, operations, HR, etc etc.... which still pay pretty well, give us a cushy lifestyle, and more or less shettles us in life. But that resentment exists.

Now of course, this resentment towards the I-banking-types has two possible sources, not mutually exclusive - one, that they actually are dickheads who are arrogant, snooty, and look down upon others, and so deserve to be kicked when they are down; and two, that they are actually just smart folks and hard-working, who got the right breaks they deserve, so envying them is the work of petty and churlish minds.

Whatever the case might be, and whatever the validity of the resentment, one thing is for sure. 95% of the MBAs in the world, even as they are publicly shaking their heads at the downfall of these investment banks and bemoaning the resulting stock market meltdown, are chuckling privately and thinking to themselves - "Hahhh.... that asshole who was preening around for landing a job in Lehman must be clearing out his desk and updating his resume right now. There IS a god!".

And yes, I am one of them. And again, I am not proud of feeling what I feel. But it is a cheap thrill I thought I would never experience.

We did our bit

The economy is too bad.

Biggest depression in known history has set in, and looks like its here to stay.

Terrorism is raising its ugly head throughout the world.

Jobs are being lost at an unprecedented rate.

Thousands are becoming homeless as they fail to pay their mortgages.

Inflation is high.

WE ELECTED BARRACK OBAMA, NOW HE WILL TAKE CARE OF IT ALL. (he better does)

The intelligent investor

Hard times have indeed fallen on most of us, for some real and for others perceived. With the toughening economic conditions many a man has lost his job and is feeling the full impact of the recession. For others outside the US and the hard hit western economies there has been a huge erosion in the paper wealth they had in the local stock exchanges which has lately evaporated.

Millions who have lost their millions in the stock meltdowns across the world have till now been happy to see their investments grow with every new bull run, most of these people neither had the wisdom to understand the risks associated nor the courage to come out of the market when the going was good. It takes enormous amounts of luck to perfectly time the market and the best of 'punters' cannot, but it is this illusive dream that all our retail investors pursue, no wonder they are ones crying the loudest.

Most interestingly the disappeared money does not impact their lifestyle or standard of living much. Our average investor is just happy seeing his net worth go up every day. Except the US where they look for a reason to spend the rest of the world does not builds in this notional money into their household income.

So in essence their never was any money, we never had built the wealth created in the stock markets into our household cash flows and in real terms it does not impact us anyhow. The only thing the stock market was doing was telling us that we are now worth this much. Everybody was just happy to know they are rich and since they don't know that now they are sad.

But how does it matter.