Tuesday, October 7, 2008

OK, What Is the Stock Market Really Worth?

Well it’s looking more and more like our $3 trillion in residential real estate losses has been a good estimate. We’ll estimate another $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate, and still another $1.5 trillion in credit cards, car loans, etc. So that is $6 trillion total in debt losses.

Someone mentioned that the 777 point DJIA loss equated to something like $1.2 trillion in lost wealth, so we’ll make the assumption that the loss of 3000 recent points is a $4.5 trillion loss, part of which is already included in the $6 trillion in debt losses, part of which is not. So we’ll add $2 trillion to the $6 trillion for a total aggregate loss of $8 trillion.

Going back to 777 points = $1.2 trillion, the other 9400 points are worth around $15 trillion on paper. But since the smart guys on Wall Street have everything leveraged 30 times, the $8 trillion in real losses means that $240 trillion have vanished, which equates to 155,400 DJIA points.

So, the true value of the DJIA is thus 9,400 points minus 155,400 points, or…

Minus 146,000 (satire, kind of).

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