It's all my fault

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, though.

Back when the dotcom bubble was in full swing, and money was falling out of the sky, I turned the last of my Tripod stock options into an E*Trade account and spent some time daytrading.

I was spectacularly bad at it. Showed a real penchant for buying a stock days or hours before it fell out of the sky, hit the ground with a sickening thump, maybe gave a little dead-cat bounce and then just lay there twitching for good. Finally I’d had enough, dumped most of what I had left into a NASDAQ index fund and just left it alone. Not long after that, the long-predicted crash of the tech stock market finally happened.

All you nerds who lost your jobs back in 2000: sorry about that. I should’ve gone for the DJIA. Except then we’d have hit peak oil early, or something. So maybe it was for the best.

Point being, of course, that today’s headlines (“Dow Slides Again After Europe Sell-Off,” “Worries that the Good Times Were Mostly A Mirage,” “Anxiety Crashes The Party At Davos,” “Fed’s Ritual Slaughter Of Interest Rate Fails To Revive Market”) are all because a month or so ago, I forgot about my vast power to wreck international marketplaces and made a tiny cautious little investment in Apple. Which was doing great, right up until it wasn’t.

So, I’d like to apologize in advance for the coming recession. I really didn’t mean any trouble; I just thought the iPhone was nifty.