Love on the rocks.

From yesterday's NY Times article on Madoff investors:

“These were people with a fair amount of money, and most of them sought no professional advice,” said Bruce C. Greenwald, who teaches value investing at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. “It’s like trying to do your own dentistry.” Mr. Hedges said, “It is a real lesson that people cannot abdicate personal responsibility when it comes to their personal finances.”

A friend of mine was describing to me his reaction to the Cramer-Stewart confrontation. What he got from this was that there are 2 financial systems, one for the everday joe investor, and one for a privledged few, which cannabilized the everyday joe. Now myself being involved on Wall Street for nearly twenty years, I offered him some pretty hard evidence to the contrary of whatever ideas he thought were being given to him via the Stewart camp. But that did not matter, his mind was already made up.

The sum of all fears it seems is distrust. Distrust with a financial system that was preached for the past 50 years as a way for the salaried worker to see his money grow faster than inflation. It still is, in my opinion. Only with the guidance and dilligence of the few, not the many. If your only means of financial literacy comes from the idiot box, rather than the squauk box, thnn caveat emptor.