I learned something that might be useful - "In times of crisis, correlation increases."

I read an interesting thing on the Seeking Alpha BLOG that I will not try to repeat here, (and that BLOG refered to this article)

The article stated something quite interesting:

There is no escape. People investing in stocks have lost money since world equities peaked on Hallowe'en last year and shifting around the world cannot change that. The amount you lose is determined by your home currency.

So it sounds as though the world economies are slowing down in lock step.....probably an indication of hosw strong of an influence the US economy, and the US Dollar has on everyone.

So my theory has been that the world would eventually get tired of the USA's debtor ways, and find a way to replace our consumtion with consumers....oh, say from China or India.

I think the sign that this has begun to take hold is when the three economies of the world stop correlating so closely.....when the USA is allowed to drop while the others level off and then perhaps climb.

At that point, there will be a clear winner in terms of where to invest. But what to do in the mean time.

Teaching kids about money.... (how to handle it, and hopefully how to save)

A while ago I wrote a BLOG post describing how my wife Cheryl and I tried to teach our kids the value of saving...and how to put money away for later purchases. (or a rainy day)

The idea was to make them see the value of saving, and the value of interest paid for doing so.....I just had to exagerate the interest so that they would "see" how it works in a short time.....vs over 20 years.

Well, there are plenty of other aspects of handling money that we need to teach our kids....and I remembered that when I read this article that was written to explain just that.

But let me say this about all of that.....I truly believe that money is but a tool. We must not let it rule us.....but we MUST rule it, or at least respect the place it has in our society. (and take responsibility for ourselves)

My dad used to say, "Money doesn't make the world go around, but it sure greases the wheel." I believe that, and it means we at least have to make it a part of our sphere of responsibility. We don't want to worship it, but need to take responsible of it in our lives.

So teaching our kids about it is important if we ever expect them to do the same.

Hmmm...people are starting to report: "Living Paycheck to Paycheck Gets Harder"

I'm a bit perplexed about what exactly is going on because as I see it, the stock market has been going up over the last 9 months or so (until the last week or so that is), yet I feel the economy slowing down.

Slowing down in terms of prices rising, dollar devaluating and people worried about their jobs. (people I know)

Then I read this article on how pay checks are not going as far as they used to, and I say....Hmmm, this is how I thought things were going.

So how can the Investment Community feel so comfortable with business to the point where they drive the cost of stocks up?

Well, it wasn't all that long ago when I remember this .COM bust we had.....and as I recall, I remember wondering how these stocks could be valued the way they were when the underlying companies seemed to have ZERO chance of making a profit.

I was told "Oh, this is a new economy"....

Well, what did we learn.....it really wasn't any different, but the people boosting the stocks were probably smoking something and could not see the forest from the trees.

Is this what we have now? Was todays 360 point market drop just the start of a long series of "corrections"....as we said back in 2001?