What a decade it's been too. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 11,354 on December 31st 1999. Exactly ten years later it's at 10,500. When history looks back at this decade, many people will say it was a lost decade economically. The blue chips lost 8% over a decade? That's ridiculous in itself, but lets talk about the fact that past over the past 27 months the Dow has gone from 14,100 to 6,600 back up to 10,500.
The numbers speak for themselves... and what really has caused all of this? The infamous "sub-prime mortgages"? The large bank institutions that gave loans and mortgages to everyone and their mother? The government that allowed trading, splitting up and selling of bad mortgages and loans into thousands pieces? Sure, they all contributed to where we are today, but the real root of the problem is the ignorance of fiscal responsibility of the average American.
I could bring up stats of how much more debt the average American had in 2000 versus 2007 but we all know what those numbers would look like. Where in our education system in the US is a requirement for learning how to take fiscal responsibility? In high school, the average student learns about the history of the Mayans, the periodic table and the pythagorean theorem. These are clearly more important topics than learning how to learn how to save and spend money. The combination of the ease of credit, society's image that anyone can achieve the American Dream and the lack of education of financial responsibility of our youth exploded in our faces in 2008. No wonder this will be called the lost decade.
To be continued...
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