What The Heck UUM Is Doing?

The most stupid action of Universiti Utara Malaysia in charging students Choo Kok Wei, Medecci Linell Repong and Tengku Mohd Hasrul Tengku Malek for merely practicing their basic human rights and responsible students in voicing their dissatisfaction pertaining to students’ rights. UUM must understand students problem and should be solve in professional way. As Robert Kiyosaki said , intelligent not about what is right or what is wrong, but what is appropriate. This unintelligent move by UUM will make this self claimed management university a laughing stock in near future.

The action of the university to charge the students under the Universities and University Colleges Act (Uuca) is clear attempt to silence dissenting voices and to suppress the freedom of speech of the students.
The reason for charging Choo Kok Wei and Medecci Linell Repong is because they initiated an online protest petition to protest the increase in campus bus fares.
Rather than being punished, the trio should be reward as they have proved their ability and courage to fight for the students right.

Is this action a crime in Malaysia? Is it a crime to express your dissatisfaction on an issue affecting yourself? Why the students being denied to express their thought?
What is this country coming to? Is there no freedom to voice out about on issues affecting us? Is the university a jail where students cannot voice out anything but have to just follow, follow follow? If the answer if Yes, well I'm very sure that this university will produce more cow than intellectual graduates.

When someone tries to open his or her mouth, the Uuca is dangled in front of them to silence them. If this continues, the country’s graduates will be just mere followers and not thinkers. For sure, this stupid Act will make malaysian university looked like high school school thinking style.
We will be producing just passive citizens who would not be able to think for themselves or the nation. Is this what we want?

It is time the Uuca is abolished so that it cannot be used to restrict students independence and human rights. Uuca have damaged our students brain power.
Uuca is a political tool for the university authorities and the government to control students on campus and to not allow them to move freely.

Every lecturer or academic staff in UUM know that the freedom of expression is stated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Article 10 of the federal constitution. So, why they just silence or make no comment? I guess that they have no gut, preserving their job security, poor mindset, fear of failure and etc.. This kind of lecturer will make our university going bankgrupt of intelligent one day ahead.

The investment scam-artist's playbook

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- If successful businesses share certain "best practices," do scam artists have their own favored techniques? The banker R. Allen Stanford, while accused of a smaller scheme than Bernie Madoff's, conducted his business in ways that make it appear they were using a similar playbook.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Houston-based Stanford Financial Group of falsely promising steady returns to thousands of investors in $8 billion worth of investments sold as certificates of deposits (CDs). On Feb. 19, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents served Stanford with civil papers in Fredericksburg, Va. So far, criminal charges haven't been filed.

Details in the Stanford case are still emerging and many differences have already become clear. Stanford Financial isn't accused of running a Ponzi scheme, only of advertising unrealistic returns and investing in riskier, less-liquid instruments than advertised. Ironically, the SEC says that Stanford lost at least $400,000 with Madoff through feeder funds, all while assuring investors that the firm wasn't involved with Madoff.

But there are also some startling similarities. And what emerges looks like a formula on how to get mixed up in a massive government fraud case. The key elements:

Offer steady, good returns.

The returns reported by Madoff's firm of 10% to 12% year after year were so good that people practically begged him to take their money. Stanford Financial's numbers weren't too shabby, either. According to the SEC complaint, Stanford Investment Group hasn't failed to hit its targeted investment return of 10% since 1994. The returns on the so-called CDs ranged from 16.5% in 1993 to 11.5% in 2005.

Get yourself an obscure auditor.

Madoff used a three-person firm, Friehling & Horowitz, based out of a 13-by-18 foot storefront office in New City, New York, to check his books. The firm, which really only had one active accountant, told a key industry accounting group that it didn't audit. Neighbors of the office said only one person periodically visited the office, usually for a 10- to 15-minute stretch.

Similarly, Stanford used CAS Hewlett, which the SEC described as "a small local accounting firm" based in Antigua where "no one ever answered the phone" when the SEC called. Hewlett's CEO, according to the Financial Times, died in January and since then one of Hewlett's children who lives in Britain has been taking over the business.

Praise the regulators.

In December 2000, Madoff urged the SEC to remain robust. In an advisory committee meeting, he said it would make him feel "very uncomfortable" if the SEC were to relax its oversight. "The S.E.C. must," he said during a meeting of the agency's Advisory Committee on Market Information, "as they have always been, sort of been the overseer of everything that we do to keep us from injuring ourselves, as well as injuring the public."

Stanford followed suit in November 2007 at the Caribbean International Leadership Summit, saying the Caribbean needed to increase its enforcement to discourage rogue investors. "Individuals and corporations ... come to our debt-ridden, small-island nations desperate for foreign investment and in simple terms, rob them." He added: "The reality is that hardly any investor is properly vetted."

Spread the wealth.

Thousands of charities were invested in, or had donations from, Madoff and his firm, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Madoff also gave to politicians including New York Sen. Charles Schumer and New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

Stanford was no slouch with the giving, either. The financial group sponsors a golf tournament for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and donated to museums in Houston and Miami. Stanford himself also donated to Barack Obama, John McCain and Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and Texas Rep. Pete Sessions. The politicians have said they'll donate the money to charity.

Hope your skeptics are ignored.

Watch out for any nosy investigators who might try to tip off regulators. Hedge-fund researcher Harry Markopolos, to name just one example, had been warning the SEC since 2000 that Madoff was up to something.

And while the Stanford scandal is still unraveling, an early tipster has emerged: Independent analyst Alex Dalmady questioned Stanford's returns in a piece he penned for a Venezuelan economic publication and first floated the idea of fraud. In his article, he wrote: "The bank's deposits have grown from $624 million in 1999 to over $8.4 billion at year-end 2008. That's an average compound growth rate of 34%! Now, that [emphasis his] is unusual. Very aggressive deposit growth is usually a 'red flag' for banks. It's difficult to invest such a deluge of money efficiently. It also indicates that something may be 'too attractive.'"

What we don’t know will hurt us – Frank Rich

FEB 23 – And so on the 29th day of his presidency, Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill.

But the earth did not move. The Dow Jones fell almost 300 points. GM and Chrysler together asked taxpayers for another $21.6 billion and announced another 50,000 layoffs. The latest alleged mini-Madoff, R. Allen Stanford, was accused of an $8 billion fraud with 50,000 victims.

“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality.

Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized GOP but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

This phenomenon could be seen in two TV exposés of the mortgage crisis broadcast on the eve of the stimulus signing. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” focused on the tawdry lending practices of Golden West Financial, built by Herb and Marion Sandler.

On Monday, the CNBC documentary “House of Cards” served up another tranche of the subprime culture, typified by the now defunct company Quick Loan Funding and its huckster-in-chief, Daniel Sadek. Both reports were superbly done, but both could have been reruns.

The Sandlers and Sadek have been recurrently whipped at length in print and on television, as far back as 2007 in Sadek’s case (by Bloomberg); the Sandlers were even vilified in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch last October.

But still the larger message may not be entirely sinking in. “House of Cards” was littered with come-on commercials, including one hawking “risk-free” foreign-currency trading — yet another variation on Quick Loan Funding, promising credulous Americans something for nothing.

It wasn’t until the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame saga caught fire in summer 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished,” that we began to confront the reality that we had gone to war in Iraq over imaginary WMD. Weapons inspectors and even some journalists (especially at Knight-Ridder newspapers) had been telling us exactly that for almost a year.

The writer Mark Danner, who early on chronicled the Bush administration’s practice of torture for The New York Review of Books, reminded me last week that that story first began to emerge in December 2002.

That’s when The Washington Post reported on the “stress and duress” tactics used to interrogate terrorism suspects. But while similar reports followed, the notion that torture was official American policy didn’t start to sink in until after the Abu Ghraib photos emerged in April 2004.

Torture wasn’t routinely called “torture” in Beltway debate until late 2005, when John McCain began to press for legislation banning it.

Steroids, torture, lies from the White House, civil war in Iraq, even recession: that’s just a partial glossary of the bad-news vocabulary that some of the country, sometimes in tandem with a passive news media, resisted for months on end before bowing to the obvious or the inevitable.

“The needle,” as Danner put it, gets “stuck in the groove.”

For all the gloomy headlines we’ve absorbed since the fall, we still can’t quite accept the full depth of our economic abyss either. Nicole Gelinas, a financial analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, sees denial at play over a wide swath of America, reaching from the loftiest economic strata of Wall Street to the foreclosure-decimated boom developments in the Sun Belt.

When we spoke last week, she talked of would-be bankers who, upon graduating, plan “to travel in Asia and teach English for a year” and then pick up where they left off. Such graduates are dreaming, Gelinas says, because the over-the-top Wall Street money culture of the credit bubble isn’t coming back for a very long time, if ever.

As she observes, it took decades after the Great Depression – until the 1980s – for Wall

Street to fully reclaim its old swagger. Not until then was there “a new group of people without massive psychological scarring” from the 1929 crash.

In states like Nevada, Florida and Arizona, Gelinas sees “huge neighbourhoods that will become ghettos” as half their populations lose or abandon their homes, with an attendant collapse of public services and social order.

“It will be like after Katrina,” she says, “but it’s no longer just the Lower Ninth Ward’s problem.”

Writing in the current issue of The Atlantic, the urban theorist Richard Florida suggests we could be seeing “the end of a whole way of life.”

The link between the American dream and home ownership, fostered by years of bipartisan public policy, may be irreparably broken.

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. (Half the country, according to a new Associated Press poll, now fears unemployment.)

But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts.

The difficulty of walking this fine line can be seen in the drama surrounding the latest forbidden word to creep around the shadows for months before finally leaping into the open: nationalization.

Until he started hedging a little last weekend, the president has pointedly said that nationalising banks, while fine for Sweden, wouldn’t do in America, with its “different” (i.e., non-socialistic) culture and traditions.

But the word nationalisation, once mostly whispered by liberal economists, is now even being tossed around by Lindsey Graham and Alan Greenspan. It’s a clear indication that no one has a better idea.

The Obama White House may come up with euphemisms for nationalisation (temporary receivership, anyone?).

But whatever it’s called, what will it mean? The reason why the White House has been punting on the new installment of the bank rescue is not that the much-maligned Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is incapable of getting his act together.

What’s slowing the works are the huge political questions at stake, many of them with consequences potentially as toxic as the banks’ assets.

Will Obama concede aloud that some of our “too big to fail” banks have, in essence, already failed? If so, what will he do about it? What will it cost? And, most important, who will pay?

No one knows the sum of the American banks’ losses, but the economist Nouriel Roubini, who has gotten much right about this crash, puts it at $1.8 trillion. That doesn’t count any defaults still to come on what had been considered “good” mortgages and myriad other debt, whether from auto loans or credit cards.

Americans are right to wonder why there has been scant punishment for the management and boards of bailed-out banks that recklessly sliced and diced all this debt into worthless gambling chips.

They are also right to wonder why there is still little transparency in how TARP funds have been spent by these teetering institutions.

If a CNBC commentator can stir up a populist dust storm by ranting that Obama’s new mortgage programme (priced at $75 billion to $275 billion) is “promoting bad behaviour,” imagine the tornado that would greet an even bigger bank bailout on top of the $700 billion already down the TARP drain.

Nationalisation would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Wall Street’s last barons still seem to believe that they can hang on to their old culture by scuttling corporate jets, rejecting bonuses or sounding contrite in public. Ask the former Citigroup wise man Robert Rubin how that strategy worked out.

We are now waiting to learn if Obama’s economic team, much of it drawn from the Wonderful World of Citi and Goldman Sachs, will have the will to make its own former cohort face the truth.

But at a certain point, as in every other turn of our culture of denial, outside events will force the recognition of harsh realities. Nationalisation, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word – depression – is next on America’s list to avoid. – NYT

This financial crisis is now truly global

LONDON, Feb 21 — The financial crisis has moved from Wall Street to all streets, as the economic shock causes strains and suffering in every part of the world economy.

In Florida, a state devastated by tumbling house prices and repossessions, the inhabitants are arming themselves against recession, with requests for concealed weapon permits up 42 per cent in the past 45 days. In Moscow, the murder rate has climbed by 16 per cent. At Tetsuya's — the most exclusive and expensive restaurant in Sydney — the waiting list has shrunk from three months to 24 hours.

Over the past few months, we were told that we were caught in the worst economic crisis for 20 years, then 30, then 80, then 100. It can't be long before someone points out that really, all things considered, the Black Death was comparatively pleasant. But beyond the hyperbole, one thing is clear: what began as a financial problem in certain debt-soaked nations is battering the economies of dozens of others, as well as millions of people working in almost every trade.

It will change behaviour and alter the pecking order of the world's economies. There will be social unrest and changes of regime. Received wisdom, whether about the benefits of free trade, globalisation or European integration, may be cast on to a bonfire of recrimination. Estimates of how long the pain will last range from a year to a decade. Bring out your dead.

Among the most significant developments has been the realisation that the most prudent countries — such as Germany, Japan and China — will suffer as badly as the spendthrifts, or even worse. Despite the whiff of hubris that wafted from Berlin when the banks of Britain and America went into meltdown, Germany's economy contracted by two per cent in the last quarter of 2008, compared with 1.5 per cent for Britain's. The problem was that the Chinese and Germans were too thrifty: their countries' growth was reliant on sales of goods to countries that were borrowing. Now that Americans can't afford its products, China's exports have collapsed, down 17.5 per cent in January from a year earlier.

Americans can't spend because their house prices have crumpled, their shares have plummeted and their banks will not — or cannot — lend them any money. Insecurity is also forcing cutbacks: January saw the highest monthly jump in unemployment in 34 years. The equally worried Chinese seem to want to save still more: imports into China fell 43 per cent in January compared with the year before. Yet if no one at home or abroad wants to buy their goods, the result will be massive unemployment: some 20 million people are already said to have lost their jobs. As they head home from the coastal manufacturing belt, their government is trying to force-feed them consumer goods; 80 per cent of all white goods sold in December were subsidised.

As demand dries up, the arteries of global trade are hardening. Lufthansa's air freight division is putting 2,600 staff on short-time working, while cargo ships have so many empty containers that shipping rates are a tenth of what they were at last year's peak. The knock-on effects are complex, but painful. "For Rent" signs dot empty storefronts on the once sought-after stretch of New York's Madison Avenue, where the vacancy rate rose by 50 per cent in 2008. Rents have dropped by a third as the ladies who lunch think twice about coffee at Barneys, or frocks from Versace. This falling appetite for luxury goods helps explain why half of India's 400,000 diamond workers have lost their jobs. More than 40 have committed suicide.

Or take car sales, which Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Renault-Nissan, estimates could fall by 21 per cent across the world this year. Car companies are begging governments for handouts — but that won't shift their products from showrooms. Among other things, lower car sales mean fewer catalytic converters, which means that platinum does not need to be mined so intensively. The price of platinum has fallen by half, and the world's largest producer, Anglo Platinum, which operates mostly in South Africa, is axing 10,000 jobs.

And so the rural Chinese are not the only ones heading home. Thanks largely to a construction boom, Spain was responsible for a third of the new jobs created in the eurozone in 2006 and 2007, but is now losing 40,000 a week, and is offering subsidies for migrants to leave (some immigrants are instead digging in, selling home-cooked food at illegal markets around Madrid). Thai factories and farms used to rely on Myanmar expats; aid workers report that thousands of them are now being rounded up and sent home. Malaysia has banned the hiring of foreigners in certain sectors, while the Philippines, which has 10 per cent of its population working abroad, is braced for family incomes to tumble. Remittances from overseas are a lifeline for the world's poorest: Africans working in the developed world have been sending back US$40 billion a year to support their impoverished relatives, but the World Bank predicts that this could drop substantially this year.

Even when the crisis is not causing outright misery, it is transforming behaviour. In Britain, employers seem to be choosing to fire women rather than men — but in America, more than 80 per cent of those losing their jobs have been male; as a result, women are making up an increasing percentage of the workforce. Of course, not every extraordinary trend or statistic can be blamed on the economic crisis — but it is certainly true that cheap, home-based pursuits are making a comeback, and frippery is out. Australians spent 13 per cent less on eating out in the last quarter of 2008, while a Manhattan dentist is pitching his teeth-whitening services with the phrase "Make me an offer".

The challenge is to come up with a political response that does not make things worse. Western countries used to preach openness, free movement of people, the breaking down of barriers. Now the instinct is to raise the shutters and protect voters' livelihoods. Social unrest is spreading; particularly at risk are the nations of central and eastern Europe, which fervently embraced the free market after the Berlin Wall came down. As their workers headed west, their businesses loaded up on debt to fuel breakneck expansion; now, they can't meet their obligations, especially as the region's biggest banks were sold to Italians and Austrians, who might repatriate cash to focus on domestic demands. "The mess in central and eastern Europe is a clear result of globalisation," says Hans Redeker, a strategist at European bank BNP Paribas. "It should be no surprise to see [Western] banks acting increasingly locally while trying to please domestic governments."

The world's leaders promise to stop protectionism, but their actions speak differently. A joint statement this week from Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, said: "Protectionist measures reduce worldwide growth, deny us the benefits of global trade and confine millions to poverty." Yet both countries are propping up their car industries. Congress wants to protect the American steel industry; the French government is spending more on newspaper advertising.

However restless they are, electorates need to remember that a lack of protectionism lay behind a huge increase in prosperity for millions of people. That is not easy when jobs are being lost. A cleaned-up banking system is a top priority — but the debate has only just started about how our banks are to look, who will run them and how they will be regulated. "The history of financial crises," warns Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University, "shows a mismanagement of the regulatory framework that comes out of them."

Above all, consumers are somehow going to have to change their behaviour. Americans are certain to be more prudent during the immediate crisis, but they need to maintain that more hostile attitude to debt when it is over. It will be just as hard to persuade the Chinese, Japanese and Germans to start spending, in order to supplement export-led growth with domestic demand. "The world doesn't need more stuff to sell," explains Pettis. "It needs more buyers."

As they mature, Asian economies will in time have better pension and health systems, which will help persuade people that there is a safety net for hard times, and tease money out from under the mattress. "Surplus countries have to spend their income and enjoy themselves," says Charles Dumas, an analyst at Lombard Street Research. "The purpose of an economy is to consume." Right now, though, the main objective is survival. — Daily Telegraph

Mid-level managers worry about job security

KUALA LUMPUR: More than half of the mid-level managers in Malaysia are feeling the impact of the economic downturn in their work environment, especially on concerns over job security, according to a recent global Accenture study.

The survey of 157 mid-level managers in Malaysia found that about 40% of the respondents felt the economic downturn was affecting morale as people were worried about losing their jobs.

“In an uncertain economic environment, employers will need to take extra care in keeping employees engaged and ensuring that they maintain their job performance,” said Low Choy Huat, a director with Accenture Malaysia.

As a result of dissatisfaction, more than two-thirds of mid-level managers in Malaysia will consider another job but only about 10% are actively looking for a new job, according to the survey.

Half of the mid-level managers surveyed felt that their job dissatisfaction stemmed primarily from insufficient pay or benefits and a lack of training or development.

Two thirds of the respondents cited better pay or benefits as the reason for their desire to find a new job.

However, Low said the real reason for the job dissatisfaction was due to the morale factor with more than half of respondents saying they were most frustrated for not getting credit for the work done as well as having no clear career development.

The survey, which was undertaken in November last year, surveyed mid-level managers with an average age of 35 years old, with an average income of RM10,000 a month and seven years of working experience

Trump Resorts files for bankruptcy a third time

NEW YORK, Feb 17 — Donald Trump’s former casino company has filed for bankruptcy — for a third time.

Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., based in Atlantic City, filed for Chapter 11 protection today in the US Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey. Today was the company’s deadline to reach a new deal with bondholders to restructure US$1.25 billion (RM4.5 billion) in debt.

Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka resigned from the company’s board Friday night, after growing frustrated with bondholders. He said the bondholders had rejected his offer to buy the company and that he would consider legal action to remove his name from its three casinos in Atlantic City.

Talks already had been extended four times to try to reach a deal to give the company some financial breathing room.

The company has US$1.74 billion in total debt and US$2.06 billion in assets, according to the court filing.

The casino company owns three Atlantic City casinos but is in the process of selling the Trump Marina Hotel Casino. Its two other properties are the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

Its predecessor company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc., went through a 2005 restructuring. That followed an earlier bankruptcy in the 1990s. — AP

A generation shy of risk?

FEB 15 – You did what you were supposed to do. College. Graduate school, maybe. Bought a home. Invested in mutual funds. Bought a house.

And now? You have student loan debt. Your degree has not shielded you from unemployment (or the fear of it). The house is worth 20 per cent less than two years ago, and your retirement portfolio is down 40 per cent from its peak.

So at this moment, can you blame people in their 20s and 30s for giving up altogether on risk of any sort? It’s one of the bigger questions preoccupying those who think about money management all day.

Are we in the process of minting a new generation of adults who are averse to taking chances, whether it’s buying real estate or investing in stocks?

“We trained people that if you took risk and diversified and played by the rules that you’d have a great life for yourself,” said Howard L. Simons of the bond specialist Bianco Research. “But all of that can disappear in a hurry. And most of us can look in the mirror and say, ‘What did I do to cause this?’ And nothing springs to mind.”

I’m not sure we can say for sure whether there has been some permanent change in attitudes toward risk. It’s easy to overestimate the extent to which the world – and our perception of it – has changed in the middle of a crisis. But this one has not lasted long. And its duration does not come close to matching the period in the 1930s that left a permanent imprint on so many people’s financial habits.

Even before the downturn, younger adults were not necessarily enthusiastic about riskier forms of investing, even though they are far from retirement.

A joint study by the Investment Company Institute and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association noted that just 45 per cent of households headed by people under 40 held 51 per cent or more of their portfolios in stocks, mutual funds and other, similar investments last spring. That is less than what households headed by those 40 to 64 owned. Fifty per cent of them invested more than half their money in equities.

Data from Vanguard, however, suggests that its investors under 45 who use target-date mutual funds, which allocate assets among stocks and bonds for the investor, tend to have significantly more money in stocks than those who do not use these mutual funds.

As more employers automatically sign up younger workers for 401(k) plans and use fairly aggressive target-date funds as a default investment, those employees’ exposure to stocks will grow.

So perhaps a better question to ask is not whether people in the first half of their working lives are becoming more risk-averse, but whether they should be.

On Thursday night, Kevin Brosious, a financial planner in Allentown, Pa., polled the students in his financial management class at DeSales University on the percentage of their portfolios they would allocate to stocks right now. The majority would put less than half in stocks; among their reasons were fear of job loss, lack of accountability on Wall

Street and economic fears amplified by the news media.

The problem with their approach, according to Brosious, is that by investing conservatively they are probably guaranteeing themselves a smaller return and a more meagre standard of living in retirement.

Or, as Robert N. Siegmann, chief operating officer and senior adviser of the Financial Management Group in Cincinnati, wrote to me in an e-mail message, “Why would you consider taking less risk NOW after most of the risk has already been paid for in the market over the past 12 months?”

If investing still seems too risky to you right now, you’re not alone. At Charles Schwab, according to a spokesman, younger 401(k) participants are not making many big investment moves. But there is a sense that at least some younger investors may divert 401(k) contributions to other uses, especially as more companies reduce or suspend their 401(k) matches.

In that case, one sensible way to reduce overall risk is to pay down high-interest debt, like credit cards or private student loans. That, at least, offers a guaranteed return, since every extra dollar you pay now keeps you from having to pay more interest later. Also, the sooner you rid yourself of debt payments, the less you would need in your monthly budget if you lost your job.

“I think the only thing younger people should be more risk-averse about is the leverage they take on,” said Jeffrey G. Cribbs, president of Chicago Wealth Management in Oak Park, Ill.

In particular, he suggested they buy real estate and cars at levels below what they can actually afford.

So what kind of risk should you take on with the savings you have left over? To Moshe A. Milevsky, the author of “Are You a Stock or a Bond?,” risk should have less to do with the era in which you live and more to do with what you do for a living.

If you are a tenured professor, a teacher, a firefighter or other government employee, you have better job security than most other people. Your income stream is stable, like a bond. Certain service providers, like plumbers and doctors, have similar security.

Investment bankers and many technology and media workers, however, have more volatility in their career paths. A chart of their income might bounce around like one showing a stock’s price.

“The idea is that we should focus on our human capital and invest in places where our human capital is not,” Milevsky said. “It’s not about risk tolerance or time horizon but about what you do for a living.”

As a tenured professor, he invests entirely in equities. Other people with bond-like characteristics who are far from retirement could take similar risks, and withstand 2008-level losses, because their incomes are fairly stable. Those who have more stock-like careers, however, probably ought to invest a bit more conservatively, in both their retirement accounts and in their primary residences.

For most young people, however, their biggest asset is not a 401(k) account or a home but the trajectory of their career and the value of 20 or 30 or 40 years of future earnings. It makes nearly everyone a millionaire on paper.

So whether you are taking on too much risk right now or not, all of that money will provide many more chances to fix any mistakes you have already made.

Has your risk tolerance changed forever? – NYT