Global stock crash giving you panic attacks? Here's why you need not worry

What all this means is that the next time you hear that the stock market has set a new record low, or even a record high, know that it only affects a small proportion of Americans

Stocks, which only recently were hitting a new record practically every other day, suddenly seem to be in free fall. Or at least on a very wild ride.

Global stock markets plunged on Feb. 5, continuing the already precipitous decline from the week before. The Dow Jones industrial average, one of the most widely followed indexes, fell by almost 1,200 points, a 4.6 percent loss and the biggest point decline on record. Put another way, the world’s 500 richest people lost about US$114 billion in a single day.

Since the