One of the things that really bugs me about this country is our (relatively) new fascination with financial news. What bugs me about it is that you can tell from the way in which the news is reported that the American system isn’t really working for the benefit of all of us. It is really working for the benefit of those of us whom it already has rewarded.
For example, pretty much on an hourly basis NPR will give you an update of what “the market” is doing today. Stocks are always up or down, but they never, never stay the same. Except, you know, they do. If the DOW starts at 12,500, and ends at 12,515, then nothing much has happened. 15 points out of 12,500 is an increase of about 1/10th of a percent. It is basically statistical noise. Nothing really has occurred, it was a slow day on Wall Street.
But that isn’t how it is reported. It is reported as good news: the market was up today.
And that is another thing that bugs me about our financial reporting, the fact that having the market go up is always considered to be good, while if it goes down, that is always considered to be bad. This is how reporting on stocks is presented, this is how reporting on housing is presented. Just 3 weeks ago I was listening to the radio and the announcer exclaimed dolefully that housing prices for the past month were weaker than expected. As if higher housing prices were automatically understood to be good news, and lower housing prices were equally automatically understood to portend badly for the economy, and you would be a fool and a communist not to instinctively know that.
Except this is insane.
