The term Black Monday refers to a Monday during the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As we all learned in high school, this Crash ushered in the Great Depression during which food was scarce and jobs scarcer, crime flourished and investors sky-dived off high rises. I distinctly remember the picture by Dorothea Lange in which a mother stares hopelessly into the distance with a young boy on either side of her, their faces buried into her shoulders.

So when on Monday, March 17th, as I drove up to visit my dad I heard the NPR Marketplace analyst use the term Black Monday and Great Depression to describe the worries surrounding the current downward spin of the Stock Market of which the Bear Sterns crisis was simply the latest manifestation, my heart skipped a beat.

I’m about to head off to grad school this fall, I thought…my whole life is ahead of me…and suddenly my mind inserted my face into the Dorothea Lange photo desolation, destruction, depression…the end.

Okay yeah…so I’m a bit dramatic (very dramatic), but chances are you shared at least a bit of the panic I felt last Monday. The truth is, however, that the economy is far from the state of the 1929 crash but it is important to know what’s going on and how you should react in order to protect yourself. Read More »