Investors may not be quick to charge once more into the breach
John Cunniff / Associated Press
NEW YORK -- So why, you might ask, are so many investors relying on a one-half point cut in interest rates to bail them out of the great market collapse?
It might take a lot more than that, because something like $4 trillion has disappeared from investors' pocketbooks, and not in five years or 10, but in just the one year since the stock market began its lamentable descent.
Ask the question and inevitably you are told it will raise confidence, and that might be true. But it will hardly lift it to the irrationally exuberant levels that created those easy trillions. Billions at best.
Investor confidence alone isn't likely to reunite the love affair with stocks. Distrust has been sown, and when it enters any relationship, things are seldom the same. There won't be any irrational exuberance for a while.
For one thing, millions of baby boomers, known to have taken what they felt was their last shot at becoming wealthy, are now, chagrined, older and nearer retirement.
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