How Main Street Views Wall Street’s Crisis
Earlier today, Bloomberg’s Laurence Viele Davidson and Michael Janofsky wrote an interesting piece on the reaction of the American public to the chaos going on down on Wall Street. As I read the article, a number of words came to mind to describe how Main Street sees the latest financial crisis:
Ignorance
“I’m trying to absorb all this,” said Palladino, 48, a television writer, as he had coffee yesterday at the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles and read newspaper accounts of the demise of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
The significance of the 158-year-old New York firm’s bankruptcy filing eluded him, he said. “I don’t know more than anyone else, financially,” he said. “A bank to me is an ATM and a checking account.”
Blamethrowing
Linda Burke, 57, a customer service consultant with AT&T Inc. in Atlanta, said she figured her retirement savings would take a hit and added that she was angry, though she wasn’t sure at whom.
“If I knew more,” she said, “I could find someone to blame.”…
Jay Leslie, 60, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, said he may not be able to retire as planned in five years.
“I may have to work longer,” said Leslie, who sells women’s clothes. He said he blamed Washington, not Wall Street. “The government didn’t have any idea how serious this was,” he said.
Litigation
That wasn’t the view of Gary Jones, 67, an Atlanta retiree who said he was “so concerned I stayed up the last two nights moving my money into T-bills and other safe havens.”
“We ought to sue the heck out of every board of director for the last 10 years,” he said.
Apathy
For Shelley Sims, 44, who lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and works for Georgia Pacific LLC’s import-export division, the failure of storied companies was a wake-up call. She said she would start paying more attention to financial markets.
“When you see names like these in the news, it’s alarming,” Sims said. “It made me get my mortgage papers and investment documents.”
??????
For Chaz Harris, the developments didn’t convince him that the U.S. was in any trouble.
“The economy’s pretty bad, but people are still spending money on what they want,” said Harris, 20, an unemployed warehouse worker who lives with his parents in Weehawken, New Jersey. Referring to the Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. video game, he said, “I mean, ‘Grand Theft Auto’ did half a billion in seven days. So the economy’s not that bad.”
New economic indicator?
Source: WikiGTA
Source:
“Americans Certain Lehman’s Bad, Just Not Sure It’s Bad for Them”
Laurence Viele Davidson, Michael Janofsky
Bloomberg, September 16, 2008
