You're FAWRED!!! Mr. Broker.

"Fear is the mind-killer."

A mantra of the Bene Geserit, from Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Fear has always dominated human minds. While some see it as an emotion, it is actually a simple reaction to stimuli. You see or feel something that your brain deems dangerous, and you feel fear. For this reason, it is much harder to banish it from the mind. Others would disagree, but that is their problem.

Nowadays, people's lives are dominated by fear. Terrifying images of doom are arriving all the time from our politicians, our media, and even our brokers as the economy bleeds. What does this do to us? For one thing, it completely destroys our rationality. We now react to fear in itself WITHOUT THINKING. We base our opinions on how we fear instead of fearing what we decide to fear.

An example perchance? The stock market, more specifically, the housing market. House prices rose steadily for over a decade without ever faltering. People who got in early made a lot of money. This of course made the rest of the dumb mob buy in. They forgot the simplest rule of investment: buy LOW, sell HIGH. Brainless as they were, they bought HIGH, then waited as the market dipped a tiny bit. They then all panicked and sold LOW. When to fix the situation they should have waited it out. This panic led to 6.5 million jobs lost in the US alone, and an estimated $US 80 trillion world-wide, so far.

They got into this mess by being stupid. When a few cold heads could have saved them all, the freaked and sold. Not because they were rational, not because of logic, but because of FEAR.

Fear is a response, and should be never be treated as a reason. Protect your mind, don't fear.