I’m not afraid that I don’t really know what’s going on. But I’m guessing it’s somewhat more than a correction, and the plunge may be solidly rooted in inconvenient realities that won’t resolve themselves quickly.

Of course I hope the truth is much better than what I suspect. I’m getting close to retirement, and my only significant source of retirement income (except Social Security) will be tax-deferred money I’ve been squirreling away in my TIAA-CREF accounts, more in stocks than anywhere else. So it might be the case that my hope of retiring in my lifetime might be fading away. And I certainly know that the situation of many other Americans around my age is much more grim.

It might also be the case that the market will bounce back tomorrow or in a few months or next year. Who knows, really? Not people of my economic pay grade and level of interest in financial things in general.

I should have, you say, had the prudence to put my money in a safe place. But that’s the way, in recent years, to keep the growth in your personal worth from whipping inflation, and the whole theory of the 401(k) as an effective retirement mechanism has been dependent on the stock market beating inflation something like 2–1 over the long term. That, of course, might still prove to be true. Who knows? But the relationship between valuation of stocks and real productivity has been out of whack for a while now.

In general, I’ve always longed for an old-fashioned pension (like some collectivist or socialist), and more so today than most. Just as I would rather rent a condo that buy a home. The “ownership society” has to drag me in kicking and screaming.

Having said that, it’s possible to see some justice in the market swoon.

Joel Kotkin has observed that one piece of evidence that America is bifurcating into two increasingly distant classes is that fewer and fewer Americans actually own stock. Meanwhile, rising stock prices have been the main way of some Americans accumulating considerable wealth. The market soars far beyond any modest growth in productivity. You can say that the people who have cleaned up in the market deserve what they’ve gotten because they’ve been risk-takers. But it seems to me that the reward has been typically out of proportion to the real risk.

So today is a great day for the genuinely risk-averse or simply virtuous ordinary American who prefers the mattress to the market as the place to put his (or her) money. I hope he (or she) is laughing on his (or her) front porch drinking domestic beer.