Winds of Change?

The stock market fiasco and Everyone-Is-Bankrupt thing has me stumped.

I don't know much about money, except that you have it and buy stuff, or you don't have it, and you don't buy stuff. Most of what I'm hearing these days is that not too many people in the world have that sense of what money is about.

I appreciate credit; but I've always assumed that "credit" is an amount that you KNOW will be paid back to you, or that you KNOW you CAN pay back. Not speculation. KNOW. Not a gamble. KNOW. But then, I hate gambling, whether it is for pennies or peanuts. Calculating odds has no hold on my mind at all, thank God it wasn't a course in university.

Anyway, the headlines are full of dropping stocks, and bankruptcies, and economists and politicians with their hair on fire, and all I could think of was how gas prices skyrocketed this past spring and summer, and now oil is going for 40 % less and so OPEC wants to cut back production -- or so I was told. If true, why didn't gasoline at the pump drop 40% also?

If the producers of oil want to rape and pillage, are the producers of wheat and corn far behind? And that will require the producers of beef and pork to follow suit, perhaps not to rape and pillage, but to keep dem profits rollin' in to the max?

What a world. Greed and profiteering make the world go 'round, and that abstract, unimportant factor of "other people" is dust under the stony wheels of $$$$$$$. At the top of the market, our house could have sold for about $550,000. Bernie sputtered when he saw the realtor's suggestion that we sell our house for that, and "upgrade."

"That's immoral," he said. "I would never do that."

Good for him. He was right. Mortgaging yourself out into the blue because of a falsely inflated market is a stupid thing to do. (Add in that none of us want to give up this total peach of a property due to comfort and location and amenities.)

Nevertheless, the times seem to be in doubt, and I did not -- did not -- panic and buy stuff at the grocer's, but did pad the larder just a bit ... just in case.

And maybe I'm not the only one. There were only five bags of unbleached flour on the shelf. Coincidence? Mebbe.