Comfort In the Economy

This has been a comforting week for me. For the past month or so we’ve watched a political death match over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction, being told if some compromise wasn’t reached by this last Tuesday we would have some sort of (unknown) economic catastrophe. So Sunday evening, a compromise that no one thinks is worth crap is agreed to, supposedly saving us from the (unknown) catastrophe. Monday it passes the House. And the stock market falls a couple of hundred points. On Tuesday the Senate passes the compromise, and the President signs it. And the stock market falls a hundred points or so. On Wednesday the market falls again before moving back up to about even. But then today the market tanks, dropping 513 points, almost 5%, the most since the financial crisis of 2008. It’s dropped about 10% over the past two weeks. “Markets nosedive amid ‘total fear’” reads the headline on the CNN site: "The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing -- that the worst was behind us," said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. "Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn't work, and we may be headed back to recession." (If we would have known we were headed for another recession would we have worried so much about the (unknown) debt-ceiling catastrophe?)

So why do I find this comforting? Because I now realize that I’m not the only idiot who doesn’t know shit about the economy – no one does. You can’t worry about something you can’t understand and can’t do anything about. Just hang on and enjoy the ride. Down the river Styx.