Wednesday, August 10, 2011
"Crazy stox like a hooker's drawers"
Actual New York Post headline today.
Say the forecast is for a foot of snow tomorrow. Even though you know the roads will be plowed in a matter of hours you go to the supermarket & buy twice as much food as usual, & the store has jacked up the prices of snow shovels & sidewalk salt, & there's a temporary shortage of milk despite milk being abundant & cheap. Turns out there's only 3" of snow. The following week you buy half as many groceries & the snow shovels are on sale. The week after that there's a water main break & with the jams & detours it takes you an hour to reach the market instead of the usual 15 minutes. The delay makes you anxious, maybe next week it's a flood, so you buy twice as many groceries. When are we gonna realize that's how the stock market operates day-to-day? But the massive buying & sell-offs are computer generated.
I know I'm simplistic. But I watch economic headlines on my homepage feeds change 180 degrees every 24 hours. 25 thousand new jobs, up; fears about European debt, down; S&P downgrade may spur recovery, up; S&P rating anxiety in Asia, down; lower oil buoys market, up; oil price rise jitters, down. I wonder if the stock market is all that mindless or it's really a relatively small number of people jerking everyone else around. Maybe both.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Say the forecast is for a foot of snow tomorrow. Even though you know the roads will be plowed in a matter of hours you go to the supermarket & buy twice as much food as usual, & the store has jacked up the prices of snow shovels & sidewalk salt, & there's a temporary shortage of milk despite milk being abundant & cheap. Turns out there's only 3" of snow. The following week you buy half as many groceries & the snow shovels are on sale. The week after that there's a water main break & with the jams & detours it takes you an hour to reach the market instead of the usual 15 minutes. The delay makes you anxious, maybe next week it's a flood, so you buy twice as many groceries. When are we gonna realize that's how the stock market operates day-to-day? But the massive buying & sell-offs are computer generated.
I know I'm simplistic. But I watch economic headlines on my homepage feeds change 180 degrees every 24 hours. 25 thousand new jobs, up; fears about European debt, down; S&P downgrade may spur recovery, up; S&P rating anxiety in Asia, down; lower oil buoys market, up; oil price rise jitters, down. I wonder if the stock market is all that mindless or it's really a relatively small number of people jerking everyone else around. Maybe both.
