With the Dow Jones safely tucked in back down below 9000, and European exchanges losing 7% on average, the positive overall global effect of an unprecedented transfer of public funds to the private sector, to the tune of some $4.5 trillion, has lasted about a day and a half.

The $4.5 trillion could have been used to the benefit of the people it rightfully belongs to, the same people who will soon desperately need every singly penny of it. Instead, it has been given away, and is now no longer available to help in what is cynically called "the real economy". And that is where the reason for today’s plunging stocks lies: the real economy, in the real world, where the real people live. Unfortunately for them, financial decisions are all taken by those who live in other universes, for whom the real world has no meaning without the world of finance, who are under the illusion that their multi-million bonuses exist for the good of the people. A nice way of putting it is this: “If you spent $1 million per day from the day Jesus was born until Christmas 2008, you would have spent $733 billion”. In other words, you could have spent a million a day for 12,000 years, and still not get to the amount spent in the past 5 days.

"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender."

Proverbs 22:7

Reasons to get out:

1. We are a nation of debt slaves

"Debt throughout most of history has been little more than a slight variation on slavery," wrote Michael Hudson in his prescient May 2006 article in Harper's ("The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse"). Today, however, perceptions have changed to such a degree that a mortgage is now seen as an "investment," and levels of personal indebtedness for both Canadians and Americans have never been higher.

The Vanier Institute of the Family recently reported that Canadians' household debt rose seven times faster than income between 1990 and 2007. This debt now represents a record 131 per cent of average household income, meaning that for every $100 of net income earned in Canada last year, $131 was owed.

By Kubate Baba Edward Briarpatch Magazine May 2008

My thoughts on money and investing have been shaped by my upbringing. I was raised in a 20-person household in northern Ghana. Six of us shared a small hut, beautifully roofed with thatch. The rest of my relatives lived in adjacent huts. We sustained ourselves on earnings from a small rice and millet farm. Whatever little money or food came into the home was shared equally among us.