Random Questions about the Stock Market

Some random questions:

1. WTF just happened to my retirement account? It hasn’t exactly been doing all that spectacularly since 2001, even with a sizable chunk of it placed abroad. (Its not nice to have a President who makes you decide to bet the rest of the world will grow faster than the US, and one has mixed feelings when proven right.) In the last couple of years, it has grown – not 1990s grown, but grown nevertheless. But the last couple of weeks… even money placed abroad has tanked. When Republicans tout the advantages of an ownership society, they don’t tell you the benefits associated with dealing with a situation in which just about everything is tanking.
2. Will we finally stop hearing the end of this nonsense? Please! It isn’t true of the economy as a whole, and it certainly isn’t true of the stock market.
3. If we get more stagnation or worse, how long until the drumbeats for more tax cuts becomes incessant?
4. Memo to Republicans. You got everything you wanted for the past few years. Everything. A Republican President and a Republican Congress have guaranteed it, and even the Dem takeover of Congress hasn’t seemed to change anything, what with the Dems being too cowed to do anything.

What do I mean by everything? The tax cuts. The big military expansion. Whatever incursions into Civil Liberties y’all were after. A very friendly Fed. For the last few years, real economic growth has been adequate (after some very poor years starting in 2001) has been adequate. Not great, not mid-and-late-1990s levels, but adequate. Ditto the stock market boom. But if we’ve started witnessing stagnation in the past few months… if the foreclosures continue, if the stock market continues to non-perform – what’s the excuse going to be in 2008?