Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.

If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

On balance, the financial system subracts value from society

Sure there are some companies at the margins of our society that probably do that and I think we all have the responsibility as consumers and as investors to avoid them like the plague. If we do, they won't last very long. Doing what's right is the only possible formula for long-term - I emphasize long term - business success.

I believe Washington should be a more active participant focusing on the issue of why corporate shareholders and mutual fund shareholders are not given fair treatment by corporate management and mutual fund management. We need to develop a national standard of fiduciary duty to ensure that these agents, if you will, are adequately representing the principles - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund shareholders - whom they are duty bound to serve.

We need to reorganize our entire system of retirement plan investing and to develop federal standards of fiduciary duty for pension trustees and fund managers. These require "top down" intervention. But we also need investors to look after their own economic interests, a bottom up approach to our problems that is well within our individual power to undertake.

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.