: It would be funny as hack if people stopped contributing for 401Ks and took a lot of their money out of the stock markets and related "investment funds" and began actually saving money in safes, safe deposit boxes, or Mason jars in the back yard and/or putting money into deferred income annuities. Or some combination thereof.
Wall Street would freak TF out. So would Congress. It'd be a hoot.
@thedisasterautist Everyone wants to get rich easy. It's incredible the number of people I know who started investing in stocks in recent years, and to be honest, i'm included in that although I'm very low on the totem pole of investments.
@Stevo: The get-rich-quick in stocks was the big thing in the 1980s. Shunting everyone's money into the stock market was the way Reagan & Co. figured would make life better, but it didn't, really. The results were illusory, smoke and mirrors, but hey, it made people fell better and made a LOT of people VERY rich.
@thedisasterautist The whole Gamergate or whatever it was called there a few years ago is what got a lot of the people I know into it.
@Stevo: Alas, I know personally or have known personally more than a few people, more like maybe a hundred or so since after the 2008 bubble-bust who did crypto, NFTs, and/or used stock trading apps and all lost more than a little money. Some lost most of what they had (or borrowed) to the whims of the markets, bad advice, or plain old grifts. Many SFTU bragging about how well they were doing pretty quickly. Some tried to do the pyramid scheme thing with them as well and went bust.
@Stevo: I've also seen quite a few, though not nearly as many, people get in hot water with the IRS because they include their actual cashed-out gains from stocks and/or crypto sold.
@thedisasterautist Just because of that, my best buddy invested so much money, stocks is all he talked about for so long until he just stopped talking about them. I actually never asked him but i'm sure he lost a lot of money. I've invested peanuts so far, he's was throwing grands in there.