T A B L E__T A L K Who should pay for debt brought into a marriage? Toss in your 2 cents in Table Talk's Business and Personal Finance area R E C E N T L Y Separate checkbooks By Hank Hyena and Carol Lloyd Married but not sharing (09/04/98) How far will Wall Street fall? By Jonathan Broder Russia's economic turmoil may spread, says one stock analyst, but the fundamentals of the American economy are still strong (08/28/98) Dis Capital By Heather Chaplin Capitalism bashing or pedophilia: which is a greater taboo? (08/28/98) Bull marketing By Anita Bartholomew While Wade Cook rides high on lucrative investment seminars, its customers' portfolios take a tumble (08/21/98) Hip! Hip! Hooray! Anyone remember who we're boycotting today? By Kevin Kelleher Boycotts are more effective than ever -- but the public's role in them is becoming increasingly irrelevant (08/07/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Reluctant Capitalist archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists		[ T H E_.R E L U C T A N T_.C A P I T A L I S T ]________ The new investors have so much faith in the market, plummeting stocks only excite their perverse optimism BY HEATHER CHAPLIN | I imagine that Tuesday's brief resurgence in the stock market has my telephone repairman somewhat irked. Last week, when he was installing an additional line in my house and Wall Street was suffering record losses, he was pleased as can be. Unlike the anarchists who marched outside the New York Stock Exchange during the crash of October 1987 with signs reading "jump," my telephone repair man harbors no ill will toward the stock market. In fact, he has almost enough invested to retire at his current ripe age of 29. He just wanted prices to keep sinking so he'd be able to sweep in and carry off a bundle of his favorites -- Lucent, IBM, Pacific Bell -- on the cheap. My telephone repairman has been investing since he was 17, when he received a chunk of money in exchange for two fingers lost in a work site accident. His confidence in the power of the stock market is so great, two weeks of record-breaking decline didn't phase him. They only whetted his appetite for more. It's not news that "average" Americans invest in the stock market -- more Americans are invested in stocks than in their homes these days. Neither is it notable that young people do it -- according to the Investment Company Institute, 45 percent of people aged 18 to 30 are invested in stocks. But what does seem amazing is the aplomb with which new-style investors are willing to keep their fingers off the stop button now that this elevator ride up has gotten bumpier. Just a tad bumpier. In the two weeks ending Sept. 4, the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 18 percent from its all-time high on July 17 of 9337.97. In the first half of this decline, the Dow suffered its greatest point loss in a one-week period, losing 481 points. The next week, it lost 411.43 points, its second greatest loss in a one-week period. The newspapers were splashed with pictures of brokers wringing their hands and traders looking like their bags were half-packed for a mass run for the hills. The reasons for the decline are manifold, and anyone who's seen a newspaper in the past three months can probably recite the prime culprits like a nursery rhyme. There's the Asian crisis, the Russian troubles, the concerns over Latin America (as Barron's said this week, "We're seeing the soft underbelly of globalization -- and it ain't pretty"). There's the whole Monica business making people feel unstable, and there's the fact that corporate profits may not be able to maintain the miraculous pace we've grown accustomed to. Elevator, going down. Just as we're getting our sea legs, though, and growing accustomed to the breakneck speed with which we're careening past floors we thought we'd never have to see again, the car grinds to a sudden halt. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan makes a few comments in California, people start to think interest rates are going down or that the Fed might be coordinating a response to the crisis in Russia and Asia, and before we can pick ourselves up off the floor, we're flying again, but this time back up. On Monday, Japan's benchmark Nikkei index jumped 5 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index rose 7.1 percent. Then the next day, our own Dow shot back up to 8020.78, a 380.53-point climb -- the biggest one-day point gain in its history and the biggest percentage gain since Oct. 21, 1987, two days after the October crash. Financial stocks like American Express and Citibank, which took nasty beatings last week, jumped by 6 3/8 and 7 5/16 respectively. The NASDAQ composite index soared 94.34 points, or 6 percent, its biggest point gain and second biggest percentage gain ever. Hard-hit technology stocks registered stunning gains, with Yahoo picking up 9 1/4 and Amazon.com rising 6. Pictures of traders start to appear on my financial Web site; this time their giant smiles -- like gaping holes hovering above their suspenders -- fill the frame. By Thursday's close, the Dow is back down to 7615.54, a steep decline of 249.48. I bet traders are looking a little blue around the gills, and I'm starting to feel a little queasy. I talked to one friend who has a bit of money tied up in stocks and, like my telephone repairman, he told me he isn't at all worried. Fascinating, exciting, exhilarating are the words he and others I spoke with used to talk about the wild gyrations in stock prices and the crazy losses posted at the end of each day. And I know what they mean. Even when your own stock is losing value, it's still spellbinding to watch something unraveling in such a chaotic and unpredictable manner. Unlike my telephone repairman, my friend was cautious enough about the market's near-future prospects to put a recent bonus into cash rather than supposedly discounted stocks, but he had no doubt that even if Tuesday's rally is short-lived, the market will eventually regain its upward march. Other people echoed the same confidence. "I don't care that I'm losing money when the market goes down," another investor friend told me. "But I worry that I don't know what to do, that I'm missing opportunities to increase my wealth." Of course, these people are young and have a long time to play the waiting game, but still, their confidence in the market is stunning. My generation seems to believe with religious certainty that the stock market always goes up eventually, and that principal seems to translate into the notion that their stock will always go up eventually. I've seen the charts in brokers' offices that map the stock market's path from the turn of the century to present day. I see how those craggy lines go up and up, as if drawn irresistibly to a magnet at the top right of the picture. If you didn't need your investment money in 1929 and could have waited it out a decade or two, you would have made out like a bandit. I see that, but I worry anyway. Are we insane, I think sometimes, to hand over our hard-earned money to companies that in reality most of us know little about? To drop it into a system, the mysterious workings of which most of us don't understand, and which the last few weeks have proven once again to be more unstable than we like to think? My broker's chart says no, we're not. My telephone repairman says no. My own profits, even withstanding the damage of last week, say no. But still I worry. History has dished up some unexpected lessons in the past, and I'm a firm believer it will do so again. So for now, I just have one question. Does this elevator have seat belts? SALON | Sept. 11, 1998