Market Meltdown or the Chance of a Lifetime?

Indeed--how long is now, because sometimes you just don't want to face what's coming in the morning.

Oh, man, tomorrow is going to be nasty in the stock market. As I write this, Dow futures are down 500 points (!) and European and Asian stocks have gotten hammered today, which is another indicator of a bloodbath on Wall Street in the morning.

But is this a bad thing?

If you're a new investor, perhaps with some cash you've been saving, the whole market is essentially going on sale. In fact, the more it falls, the more you can buy. The question is, however, when to get in? Where is the bottom? Which sectors will bounce back first? Will any sectors bounce back?

In other words, is this the normal capitalistic cycle that tends to destroy working and middle class lives to the enrichment of the top one percent, or a full-blown depression that can even punish some of the less well-advised rich classes?

Just don't stand under any open windows in the financial district tomorrow.

In my own gut I'm weirdly optimistic, but that might be just that there is entertainment value in watching CNBC during such volatile, downward activity and thinking that I might be, for once in my sorry life, right about how seriously bad this is going to be. No, it's not all schadenfreude, because however much the super-rich are hurt, they'll remain at least regular-rich while many good people are going to really suffer. But there are a lot of young folks who are going to get their revenge on my generation by buying into a market at their elders' expense. As Baby Boomers are now retiring and redeeming their investments for something to live on, their collapsing equity will be a bargain for those looking twenty or thirty years down the road.

There is a problem, however, with holding cash on the sidelines if it's in dollars--although the slide against the Euro may have slowed, our national indebtedness to foreign lenders makes me very nervous because those dollars could actually lose value, making European stocks more expensive, erasing their advantage. (Please understand that I think the EU is the underreported powerhouse in the world, and far less dependent on US economic health than Asia.)

It's one thing when the out-of-power (even when in-power) Democrats talk about stimulus packages and nobody pays attention. But things have gotten so dire that even Bush has now come out of his sedated state long enough to want to dump $145 billion into the economy via tax rebates. Despite that, the international markets are not mollified. People are freaking out. Let's just hope it's a buying opportunity for us little guys and not a rapid descent into global economic turmoil a la 1929.