And stocks are only one way to bliss out with money. The bond market is also huge. Americans have more than $2 trillion invested in corporate and foreign bonds, another trillion-plus in state and municipal bonds, plus the Treasury bonds and T-bills we (and the Japanese) have bought to cover our $5.5 trillion national debt. Then there are commodities, derivatives, money-market instruments, and just plain money itself. More than $1 trillion of international currency changes hands every day. All of these things are traded with the same frenzy of incomprehensible glee as stocks. The trading floor was starting to spin again. A feeling of desperation began to rise, and so did the take-out food that was gobbled standing up. For us civilians, savvying financial markets is like taking calculus when the last course we had in the field was high-school practical math. Not only that, but—because we didn’t pay any attention to stocks, bonds, interest rates, or the business section of the newspaper until it all got famous about a year ago—we have, in effect, hooked the first dozen calculus lectures. What are we going to do? And this is not just a matter of idle journalistic curiosity as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I may want to know why some places are as rich as Wall Street and other places are as poor as a visit to Wall Street makes me feel, but I’m also planning to retire. It seems everybody is planning to nowadays. Although I can remember a time when we all intended to die before we were thirty. We’re saving our butts off, putting $3,000 a year into our savings accounts. By 2028, we’ll be able to . . . live comfortably for thirty-six months. Of course we get dividends from those savings accounts. We consult the compound-interest tables in Money Management for Fools. At 3 percent, the $3,000 we put in the bank today will be worth $7,281.79 in thirty years. But Democrats are going to get back into Congress sooner or later. Inflation will return. We tell our kid to find the consumer-price-index Web site. It turns out today’s dollar is worth only about a quarter of what a dollar was worth thirty years ago. That means our $3,000 that will become our $7,281.79 may equal $1820.45 when the golden years begin. Of course, there’s always Social Security. I understand Meow Mix is one of the more palatable cat-food brands.
We need to invest. But investing presupposes a certain basic knowledge about investment and not just knowledge about whether corporate bonds will go up or
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