My share of meltdown

Got my investment portfolio report in the mail. Now, when I say "investment portfolio" realize that it's a modest college investment plan for my son, Bug. The state shut down its great Texas Tomorrow Fund right before he was born, so we're trying the investment route to save up for his college education. Because, you know, one of The Wife's uncles told me some years back how big a mistake I was making and how much money I was losing by not investing the girls' Texas Tomorrow Fund money into the stock market.

So the portfolio report gives me the happy news that it is worth $200 less this quarter than it was the previous quarter. And the previous quarter it was $200 less than it had been the previous year. None of this takes into account the 2,000-point plummet Wall Street's taken in the past few days.

I actually heard a pundit arguing (not in recent days, but in the past month or so) that rather than the current economic collapse being the result of too much deregulation, existing government regulation was actually the cause, because "If the government didn't require companies to report their balance sheets, they could've kept the sub-prime losses secret, and nobody would've panicked." Yeah. Gotta love the free market.

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