Trillions in stock market value -- gone. Trillions in retirement savings --- gone. A huge chunk of the money you paid for your house, the money you are saving from college, the money your boss needs to make payroll -- gone, gone, gone.
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Whether you are a stock broker or Joe Six-pack, if you have a 401 (k), a mutual fund or a college savings plan, tumbling stock markets and sagging home prices mean you have lost a whole lot of the money that was right there on your account statements just a few months ago.
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But if you no longer have that money, who does? The fat cats on Wall Street? Some oil baron in Saudi Arabia? The government of China? Or is it just -- gone?
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If you are looking to track down your missing money -- figure our who has it now, may be ask to have it back -- you might be disappointed to learn that is was never really money in the first place. Mr Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, puts it bluntly: The notion that you lose a pile of money whenever the stock market tanks is a "fallacy." He says the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money -- it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth> "We are just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth." Though some thing, of course, is disappearing as markets and real estate values tumble. Even if a share of stock you own isn't a wad of bills in your wallet, even if the value of your hime isn't something you can redeem at will, surely you can lose potential money -- that is, the money that would be yours to spend if you sold your house or emptied out your mutual funds right now. And if you are a few months away from retirement, or hoping to sell your house and buy a smaller one to help pay for your kid's college tuition, this "potential money" is something you are counting on to get by.
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For people who need cash and need it now, this is as real as money gets, whether or not it meets the technical definition of the word. Still, you run into trouble when you think of that potential money as being the same thing as the cash in your purse or your checking account. There's a key distinction here: While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can.
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" You can't enjoy the benefits of your 401 (k) if it's disappeared," Jorgenson explains. "If you had it all in financial stocks and they've all gone down by 80 percent --- sorry! That is a permanent loss because those folks aren't come back.".......
