Fall Street

The Eagles didn’t suffer the only meltdown yesterday.

Have you glanced at your 401K? Or maybe how the better question would be how many times do you check it yesterday as your retirement nest egg got fried smaller and smaller as Wall Street took a monumental nosedive.

It’s stunning the scope of what has happened, not just yesterday, but in the past few months. Household names have disappeared. We saw Bear Stearns fold up its tent.

The jolts kept coming yesterday. And again it’s the names, the bedrock of our financial community, that leap out at you.

Lehman Brothers failed to find anyone willing to bail them out and filed for bankruptcy. The financial firm dates back to before the Civil War. They survived the Great Depression. They did not survive 2008, at least not in the form we’ve become accustomed to.

Merrill Lynch, you know, those people who for most of our lives have been “bullish” on America, also had its problems.

Gone. No bull. The giant was acquired by Bank of America.

The last time, when Bear Stearns was teetering on the brink of collapse, the feds rode to the rescue. There was no white knight yesterday.

When the day was over, about $700 million had disappeared from retirement plans, government pension funds and other portfolios. Want to really feel bad for someone. Think about all those people at Lehman Brothers who first learned they were out of a job, then found out their 401K, if it was invested heavily in their own company, had just disappeared.

Wall Street had a day of epic proportions, none of them good.

The market declined 500 points, losing more than 4 percent of its value. It was the biggest drop since Sept. 11.

And it looks like more is on tap today.

American International Group, the world’s largest insurer, is fighting to survive.

Markets overseas are dropping in overnight trading.

Wall Street? They might want to start calling it Fall Street.

And you might just want to start stashing your money under the mattress again.

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