According to the article:

1 Bill Gates, $50bn, down $7bn 2 Warren Buffett, $40bn, down $10bn 3 Lawrence Ellison, $27bn, unchanged 4 Christy Walton and family, Wal-Mart, $21.5bn, down $1.7bn 5 Jim Walton, Wal-Mart, $19.6bn, down $3.8bn

So after losses the five richest folks still had a combined wealth of $158.1 billion.

In trying to put such wealth and loss of wealth in perspective, I tried to find a comparison point. I decided to look at the budget of my state of residence - Oregon. The 2009-2011 budget for the state of Oregon is roughly $132 billion - or $66 billion a year. So the state of Oregon could run for about 4.5 YEARS on the losses from those folks. Or looked at somewhat differently, The state of Oregon could run for over 2 years on the wealth of the 5 richest folks alone. All of the schools, the roads, the courts, parks, fisheries, social services and Oregon Health Plan - for 4.5 years on the wealth of FIVE people.

According to Forbes "Fun Billionaire Statistics," the combined net worth of the richest 400 Americans is $1.27 trillion. The per capita of the U.S. in 2008 was $26,964 according to the U.S. Census Bureau Table P-1. Of course that includes those richest 400 people (and their near neighbours).

There is a difference between losing a few billion and what is happening to millions of people in the country. The graphs below appeared in the NY Times

One of the interesting things in the graphs - aside from the fact we have 6 unemployed people for every job opening - is that for the entire period the number of unemployed exceeded the number of jobs.

An interesting read at Forbes is the 9/30/09 article by Keren Blankfeld "How Billionaires Control Our Lives."