Do Reports on the Stock Market Rot Your Brain?
I'm going to rant for a second, so bear with me.
Reporting on the ups and down of Wall Street has become like the coverage of a car chase on an L.A. freeway. It's all quite exciting and unnerving at first, but in the end it seems small potatoes.
It normally goes like this. The Dow falls by, oh, 200 points by noon. It's doom, despair and fear in the media for hours!
Then the next day, the Dow goes back up, and the crisis is over faster than a Lindsay Lohan vow to stop drinking. We hear it was a minor correction because the market had actually "been too high." Or that the mortgage problem isn't quite so bad because the rest of the economy is just fine, thank you. Or that traders were trying to "take some profit." Or that the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars. Who knows!
Last week, for instance, the Dow dropped sharply one day, and yet when all the weekly numbers were examined on Friday, the Dow had actually experienced a modest gain.
I know all this economic stuff is important, and complicated factors are at work. The mortgage problem is not one to be dismissed lightly. But sometimes it all just gives me a headache.
4:27 PM ET | 08-13-2007 | permalink
