After All, What Has Changed?

I suppose I should get something off of my chest. It is not your typical unburdening by any stretch. I am just becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the re-surged exuberance on Wall Street. It seems the view from the ivory tower is a lot different from what I'm seeing here on the ground. While the bonuses flow once again and bullish investors happily drive up the indices, I am truly concerned for the rest of us. We must remember that all of our money is in the market, pensions, retirement savings, college savings, institutional investments, everything.

Now that billions of taxpayer dollars has been poured into the stock market to stabilize it, instead of gratitude and conciliation on the part of financial institutions and investors, what we are left with is a blatant manipulation of the artificial comfort zone that the taxpayer was asked to create. I would expect that the market should make some gains once it separates the wheat from the chaff; there should still be some companies with good fundamentals even in a down market. But, a market that has risen disproportionally on the premise that the worsening of things has slowed down makes me very uncomfortable. A market should rise on value and fundamentals. If it keeps rising on polished bad news, how are we all to gauge our investments? We don't get to short the market and do all that fancy computer trading where we can make a few dollars each millisecond because we have the technological edge and we own the inside (read Goldman Sachs).

After all, what has changed? The disconnect between Main Street and Wall Street continues to exacerbate while Wall Street cheers and Main Street continues to struggle with financial calamity. I think many of us thought there would a common good that would rise out of this recession but it seems that whatever vestiges of it has been trampled. There has been a lot of negativity being stoked in the media that is very disturbing. People are drawn to drama and nastiness, it all goes hand in hand with the rise of reality television but there it should stay; drama and nastiness should not be the backbone of our news cycle.

Yes, we all could use some economic good news but the joyous news about economic recovery is too much good news to me when I am surrounded by so much unemployment and economic strife. I know that if things sound better and feel better then it should translate into a betterment for all. However, it seems that the benefits keep falling into the laps of the "haves" and not the "have nots."