Romance and the Recession. Really.

Now that the divorce and recession correlation is tired, more questionable connections have arisen to take its place. But my recession and romance angle, while narrow, is real. My boyfriend, the studious and starving grad student type, sensing a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity, invested his engagement ring fund (that's a ring for me, not for himself) in the most volatile stock market we've seen in nearly a century.

...What?!?
I learned this on a particularly tumultuous day in the TARP debates, when I tried to find out why he was glum. Turns out, the Tiffany diamond he was hoping the recession would deliver...had shriveled that day with his stock portfolio. Would I still marry him, he asked, if my engagement ring came from 7-Eleven...


I kissed him, and said everything would be ok. If he can't afford an engagement ring, I can buy us a nice foreclosed duplex so we could live next door to each other forever.

And that's why there's a new feature tracking major market indexes in the sidebar. I'm calling it The Diamond Index.