So where’s your money right now?
Tess Vigeland: So… about the stock market. Regular listeners to this program will know exactly what’s coming out of my mouth next. One day, one week, one month — does not an investment strategy make! But don’t just take it from me. Take it from these friends of the show, starting with our New York bureau chief Heidi Moore. Hi Heidi!
Heidi Moore: Hi Tess.
Vigeland: Alright, tell me what are you doin’ with your money?
Moore: It is primarily under my mattress. It’s a very safe bank.
Vigeland: Not if you have a house fire.
Moore: That’s true. But, we’ll probably have a fire in the market well before my house fire. Actually, I’m keeping it in very safe places. It’s in my 401(k) where I can’t sell it. I own some real estate and for the most, when there’s a panic like this, I like to not freak out and not touch my money. Because things can only go down when you start fiddling with the controls.
Vigeland: Well, I hope you can sleep with all the lumps under your mattress.
Moore: Thank you. They’re much better in dollars than in peas, certainly..
Vigeland: Wisdom from one of the smartest people I know, Heidi Moore in your New York bureau. And next to one of the other smartest people that I know. Ron Lieber, personal finance writer at the New York Times, what are you doing with your money?
Ron Lieber: Well the first thing I’m doing is I’m resisting the temptation to flee in terror from government legislators and regulators who do not know what they’re doing and are unwilling to make the hard choices. It is tempting to take all of my money and stocks and put it in emerging markets or hide it some place. But I know that I can’t predict what’s going to happen and that it just doesn’t make sense to try and play the short-term. This is long-term money. The other thing I’m doing is I’m going to the farmers’s market on Saturday and I’m spending a lot of money on tomatoes. T’is the season, they’re only eight weeks around these parts and I’m going to have a lot of tomato sandwiches.
Vigeland: You’re going to have some basil with that?
Lieber: The basil’s growing on the balcony.
Vigeland: Alright, thanks Ron. Ron Lieber speaking with us from New York and the New York Times. And finally, from across the pond, we have Felix Salmon, blogger at Reuters, joining us from Sweden of all places. Hi Felix.
Felix Salmon: Hi Tess.
Vigeland: Tell us what you’re doing with your money.
Salmon: I think I should keep on throwing it in the stock market. I feel that this is my big opportunity to buy more stocks with every dollar. They’re on sale right now. This is a good thing, right?
Vigeland: This is not the time to panic?
Salmon: No! If you’re going to panic every time the stocks go up or down in the course of a day, you should not be in stocks at all. The fact is that stocks are much higher now or at least they’re higher now than they were a year ago, they’re still going up in the grand scheme of things. So, if you obsess about what’s going on in any given one day, you’ll miss the big picture move, whether up or down.
Vigeland: Alright. I would say good-bye to you in Swedish, but I don’t know how. So bye!
Salmon: Bye Tess.
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