Losing faith

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

LA Times, July 19, 2002

NEWS ANALYSIS
Investors Losing Faith in Buy-and-Hold Mantra
By TOM PETRUNO, KATHY M. KRISTOF and JOSH FRIEDMAN, Times Staff Writers

Invest for the long haul. Don't try to play market swings. Keep most of
your money in stocks because they'll beat the alternatives over time.

These are the rules that millions of individual investors accepted as
gospel in the 1990s. But amid the worst stock market decline in a
generation, and a severe crisis of confidence in the financial system
itself, many investors are no longer sure they believe the old rules. It's
a shift with enormous implications if it gathers momentum.

With each drop in share prices--which fell broadly again Thursday--some
people even are questioning whether the once-unchallenged investing tenets
were a sham to begin with, a conspiracy on the part of powerful and greedy
Wall Street and corporate interests to sucker Main Street into the biggest
bubble in market history.

Listen to Les Greenberg, 59, a semiretired attorney and private investor in
Culver City: "There's the corporate elite and then there's the rest of us,
going to Versailles Palace and shocked by what we see. People are realizing
that a game has been played in the financial markets."

Or this posting from an investor on the Web site of mutual fund tracker
Morningstar Inc.: "While riding from Los Angeles up the I-5 to Stockton,
you pass a section where there are thousands of cows that will soon be
slaughtered. It made me think of the millions of honest, hard-working
people 'investing' for retirement in high-cost 401(k), 403(b) plans. Most
of whom will most surely be financially slaughtered."

full: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-investors19jul19.story

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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