As you’ve noticed by now the pace of posting has slowed a bit lately. To be honest, I’ve been absolutely engrossed in watching the ongoing economic meltdown. I’ve sort of moved beyond the point of being stunned to the point of being fascinated in seeing how the market unravels from a more academic point of view. I want to try to understand the fundamentals at work – particularly those that failed. Obviously, the overextended home lending market has a significant share of the blame here, but I can’t make the jump to that being the only or even the root cause. I have to think there is something more basic at work here. So far, I’ve seen a lot of “the sky is falling” from the media, but they’ve been a little short on the serious economic analysis. Hopefully as we gain some perspective on the events of the last two weeks, someone with a far more developed sense of economics than mine will connect the dots.

While I’m thinking on the overall economy, I can’t escape the precipitous fall of stock prices over the last seven days. I’m the first to cringe when I look at the daily carnage inside my retirement account, but then I realize that I have 25 more years before I can even consider retiring and it starts to dawn on me that having the market down 50% means my IRA contribution is buying almost twice as many shares as I could a year ago for the same amount of money. Given that the historic trend of the market since its inception has been to move upwards and the ridiculously long horizon involved, the long game is looking pretty positive. Yeah, I know that thinking like that probably makes me a bad person, but I’m OK with that.