And Another Thing...

Who writes those headlines at the financial websites like CBSMarketwatch, Yahoo Finance and CNN? Here is Reuters Wednesday a couple of hours between these two headlines regarding the Nikkei, the Japanese stock market, as reported on yahoo news:

Stocks gain on optimism about bailout vote

Nikkei down as economic worry outweighs bailout vote

Now the foolishness here is the conceit that someone knows the reason why markets move one way or the other. The man behind this curtain is some sleepy Reuters editor who has to come up with headlines every few minutes, and his only job is to mask the fact that the market is tens of millions of people acting with reasons unique to each, and they make make a market. The editors job is to make you think the market is a single entity which can be known, measured, and controlled. There is only one possible headline that would be credible at any time when it comes to the stock market:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! Here We Go Again!

As we can see in these days, all the kings horses and all the kings men cannot put this Humpty Dumpty back together again (and next it is the insurers who need to be bailed out.) The market is countless individuals, and a regime based on the premise that the market is a coherent entity that can be measured and controlled is untenable and will fail. Has failed.

During the Vietnam War there was a young sportswriter in Alaska who drew the graveyard shift monitoring the newswires when a story rattled over the telex regarding something like 3 US soldiers being killed in a fight that saw some 21 Viet Cong killed. The lad changed the headline to "USA at Quang Binh - US 21, VC 3" and relayed it off to the rest of the newsrooms in USA. Of course he was fired, but it was sheer poetry, and the kind of art you would get if the press was not government-controlled in the USA.

The news is a field that is wide open for innovation. The proof is that a gift shop clerk became the # 1 headline writer in USA, Matt Drudge, within the relative freedom of the internet.

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