I spoke with an acquaintance recently who said her 401k took a 47% dip in 2008. She's the HR Manager for a sizeable regional company and said that most everyone else in the company is in the same boat. Losing half of your 401k is pretty damn close to what you're talking about, jryan21.
I'm fairly certain things are going to get worse before they get better. But take heart in this: after 9/11, catastrophe planners went back to the drawing boards because the general populace did the exact opposite of what they expected.
What did they expect? In a word, pandemonium. They figured a huge catastrophic event would bring a city to its knees with the resulting civil unrest. Yes, the fuckers figured everyone would use something like that as a chance to start looting and killing each other.
What happened? NYC pulled the fuck together and helped each other out. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, bitches.
I'm well aware that there is a difference between a catastrophe and economic collapse. That people can and will start to act differently if food gets harder to come by, etc. But the biggest difference that I can see between the Great Depression and now is that people are more cynical about other people. They expect the worst and, IMHO, are more often than not surprised to see the opposite of their expectations.
