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Hello Summer!
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2005
- Posts
- 13,823
The tsunami of global stock sell-offs swept through Europe on Friday as shareholders deserted the markets in droves, pushing down stock prices in a frenzy some dubbed Red October. Exchanges that had hit record highs just a year ago plunged almost from the moment they opened. London's FTSE 100 lost 10% of its value within half an hour of the opening bell.
The glumness within the financial industry is increasingly being matched by fear in what Europeans call the "real economy," or the workaday world. Small investors, from pensioners to assembly-line workers, are bracing for a sharp decline in living standards -- and some are blaming the United States.
"This economic crisis is ruining us," Cesare Tesori, 65, said as he was out shopping in Rome. "Before when I needed money, I could at least go to the bank and get cash from the little savings we had. Now, all my investments in stocks -- especially the American ones -- have fallen so dramatically that we were advised not to sell them because we would lose too much money. So this means I can't access my money."
Retired from his job with Italian state television, Tesori sees little but deprivation ahead. "I guess the only thing left for us is to avoid using the washing machine in order to save electricity and start washing our clothes by hand, like our grandparents used to do," he said. "This is what the American economy did to us."
European folks, I know our leaders have a way of shirking responsibility and won't take the blame for this, but I do feel that we might have had something to do with this and I feel really bad about it. So, on behalf of the U.S.A., I just want to say...our bad. Sorry we got ya into this mess. We're still suck in that isolationist mentality where we think our actions have no affect on anyone else and so we tend to do things without considering the larger implications.
Depending on the upcoming election, we'll either start to think globally, or move our heads further up our asses. Either way, um, our apologies for fucking up the economy.
