Yeah, like those attorneys really care about what happened to John Q. Public during the .com crash.
The attorneys will get their cut, and investors will get nothing.
Actually, neither side should get anything. I believe all of these companies had a prospectus you could read if you wanted to know the whole story. If they didn't read it and lost their shirt, that's their fault, IMO.
I'm a proponent of "let the buyer beware." Nobody put a gun to these people's heads and made them buy this stock.
There is an old saying that many people do not heed:
"If the deal seems to good to be true, often times it is."
People who lose money because they are blinded by their own greed don't have much sympathy from me. Historically, companies needed a decade or more of strong profits before they could even LIST on an exchange like the NYSE. If you have to rely on a huckster like AJC to tell you where to invest, you probably also bought the real estate with no money down program, and lots of multi-level get-rich-quick programs.
On a lighter note, I heard that you are 10-times more likely to be killed driving to buy a Powerball lottery ticket than you are to win it.
Anyway, those are my deep thoughts for the day.
As for the middle class and their lowered standard of living, I can think of hundreds of things that cost a whole lot less than they did 10-years ago.
When you can buy a computer system for the price that it used to cost buy a black and white monitor, isn't that an improvement in the standard of living? Walmart, K-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes, and Best Buy have brought the costs of consumer goods and groceries way down. That improves the standard of living (your dollars buy more). Think of what is standard equipment on a car now compared to 10-years ago, and how little real prices have increased on cars.
The internet used to be something that was available to the educated elite, but it is available to everyone now. That improves the standard of living. Heck, what did internet access cost 10-years ago? How about long distance?
I think the standard of living is much better now for everyone, and you really have to literally go to a poor country to appreciate it (I go to China once or twice a year). By the way, the standard of living in China has been going up by leaps and bounds also during this past decade.
I agree the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have not kept up with their rate of growth, but the standard of living here is in my opinion the best in the world. |
