Herb Taylor, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, gave the bad news.
The loss in household wealth is on the order of $10 trillion. It’s as if the market took a year of income and made it evaporate.

He keynoted the Mercer County Economic Summit Program this afternoon.

The four hour event, staged by the Princeton Regional Chamber and attended by 250 people, also had two breakout sessions, including one on hot topics in energy management and a workshop on Thinking Outside the Box.

Full disclosure, I’m on the Princeton chamber board, but I thought this event was a great success, even at a $60 price tag. Lots of info, lots of networking. Perhaps the best advice came from Jerry Fennelly including “figure out what you weren’t doing that you can do now.”

I’m doing a “quick and dirty” post from this event, using the wireless connection from Mercer County Community College’s conference center. It’s a first for me to do this — to take notes at an event and post them immediately, without fancy links (to the U.S. 1 Newspaper article, though I might add that later) or photos (possibly added tonight), not even well spell checked. Corrections welcome. But this is the new world. As Jerry says, it’s the George Costanza principle. Do the opposite of what you are doing. And I don’t even have time to Google to see who is George Costanza…

It’s 6 o’clock. Time for the event to be over though the “the band’s still playing..”

Pictured: Larry Krampf, president of the chamber board, with Cheri Durst of the chamber staff.