A Children's Treasury of Sad Stock Traders

When the markets tank, editors need a photograph to illustrate the terrible loss of value in equities most people either don't own and don't understand. The obvious photograph -- poor people eating trash in the alley because they have no food and no home -- is never used, because it would seem racist. Instead, the general-news media relies on a never-ending stock collection of floor traders looking exhausted, or, like in this AP-Yahoo photo used today, floor traders simultaneously vomiting into their hands. Let's laugh at them, together.

 
 In a groundbreaking move, today's Marketwatch front page combines the precision of a chart with the pathos of some dude holding his forehead. Is this the new wave of stock-plunge illustration? Only the next five or six years of declining equity prices will tell!

 
 But what doAsiantraders do when stocks plunge? They look all sad and tired, the fuck do youthinkthey do? Here is a standard example of this stock-plunge stock photo, as seen in the Washington Post, featuring an Asian trader looking at a Big Board with the symbols in Chinese characters. This shows it is happening somewhere in Asia, maybe Shanghai or Hong Kong. Wherever it is, you can bet traders are all looking sad and holding their foreheads. Asian traders: They're just like us! (Then again, this is probably just some poorly dressed bum looking at the window display of some brokerage firm. Go get a job, bum! Flannel is so '90s.)

Here's a Reuters picture of this sad, sad floor trader in his sad floor-trading jacket looking super sad or tired or something. Is he praying? Clapping in sorrow? Whatever he's doing, it really says "the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 430.18 points today."

These are just traders, for fuck's sake! At least they got paid their wages for the day! An accurate photograph of the Financial Collapse would be, maybe, some old people who had put a lot into their 401ks, and now it is all gone, just as they need money for the assisted living place, and their poor grandson needs a face implant or something. So sad!