Evidently everyone decided to stay home today. Thin
volume marked the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq ended down 4, which is a nothing day.
We may have two more nothing days tomorrow and Friday.
I expect when Monday arrives this week will mean nothing.
For some nothing is probably better than the disasters we
have been having, but if things were really rosy you’d be
seeing a bounce off of 2850 “support.” .
Lucent blew up on news that they miscalculated some $125
million of their revenues. The stock fell 16%. No big
surpass, as Lucent has had similar problems all year. Who
knows where it will be when the stock stops dropping and
the company talks straight with shareholders for once.
We got another trade deficit report. Last month the
government reported that we have the biggest trade deficit
in history. Today we beat that record. This is some sort of trend because new monthly records have been set since the
end of 1998. This is part of Greenspan’s bubble bandaid to
patch over shaky world economy that is coming back to
haunt us. The deficit will mean that economists will have to come out and revise the third quarter GDP. It could be
lopped off by a half a %. That would mean 3rd quarter
growth was actually from 2-2.25% instead of the 2.7%.
We’ll talk more about the deficit because the Senate Report
on its causes and consequences will be published soon.
Outside Wall Street the Republican House Leaders are
passing around a “doomsday scenario” to their colleagues.
Apparently the plan is to boycott the inauguration if Gore is crowned President and do everything possible to oppose his Presidency. Gore probably won’t win, but the fact that
these kind of ideas are being tossed around in Washington
shows you the bizarre political environment that has been
created by the tweedle dumb and tweedle dee impasse.
In the real world three shocking announcements came. Billy
Graham stepped down. Rosie O’Donnell announced that
she will end her talk show next year and Fred Rogers, of
Mister Roger’s Neighborhood fame went into retirement.
Over the years he filmed 1,000 episodes and demonstrated
total mastery of puppetry as he led children to explore the
nuances of the Neighborhood-of-Make Believe and brought
characters such as Prince Tuesday and Henrietta Pussy Cat
to life.
There is a certain irony that Prince Tuesday’s reign is
ending the same year that the bull market collapsed. Robert
Precheter, who has been a leading promoter of Elliot Wave
Theory the past decade, has done a study that compares the
stock market to broader social trends. He has found that at
bull market peaks euphoria, happiness, and contentment are
heavily expressed in popular culture. When the market gets
bad the culture of light becomes a culture of doom and
darkness.
The bull market of the 1950s and early 1960s brought
movies such as Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, and Mary
Poppins. The 1970s era brought Night of the Living Dead,
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween. And the
great renaissance in horror came in the Depression era 30s
with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, and King Kong.
In the late 1990s the horror movie completely disappeared
and got replaced by comedy horrors that made fun of the
whole genre.
Music has followed a similar trend. The happy rock and roll
of Surf Music, the Beatles, and Doo-Wop became replaced
by Heavy Metal and Punk Rock weirdoes in the 1970s bear
market. During the last recession we had the dark music of
grunge and alternative Nirvana types that came and left as
quickly as the recession did. Now we have happy teenage
pop.
And in politics we had the upbeat Ike and Kennedy rule
replaced by the unstable Lyndon Johnson, paranoid Richard
Nixon, and feeble Ford and Carter Presidencies. Now we
have Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton being replaced by a
weakened mediocrite President and talk of “doomsday
scenarios” by Congressional types.
Just like the market our popular culture is at a turning point. Once Stuart loses money in his Ameritrade account he will become some bizarre angry rebel that will make the new wave punks of the early 1980s look like normal people.
The degenerates will stone Forrest Gump and Christina
Aguilara. The Backstreet Boys will be beaten to a pulp.
This happy teenage pop that has infected the airwaves will
soon be mocked by a new group of angry musicians about
to come around the corner and into the headsets of the
young and innocent.
Most people don’t find economic slowdowns and market
crashes too much fun. When their anger oozes into the
popular culture it won’t be a pretty site. Like Hunter S.
Thompson said yesterday we have seen weird times before
but you better prepare for the super weird. “The only ones
left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the
beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is
the operative ethic,” he wrote.
But one day, when the angry men blares their songs and talk
on the radio, we’ll see a silver lining over the horizon and
begin to buy stocks at the beginning of the economic
recovery as long term investments. Before that we’ll trade
in and out of longs, try on some shorts, and get ready to buy for the long haul. We’ll just have to see how many clock batteries we’ll have to buy until then. This culture of doom may stay for a long time once it arrives. We wish Prince Tuesday good luck in his retirement. We will miss him. |
