What Goes Up, Must Come Down

I realize that a lot of people are getting killed in the stock market these days-- including both parents-- but the whole wailing over it kinda bugs me. It's not that people follow it everyday as if it's a baseball season (OMG, it's down 200 points against the Nikkei Stock Exchange! Let's Make a Trade for two-hi tech companies and an industrial company to be named later!) it's just that it's become such a huge thing that it's as if the entire point of government and economics is to make the stock market go up. It's like it's some Baal-like creature that we have appease in some way, like we have to do something that make it happy and if it eventually involves the ritual sacrifice of virgins, well, so be it.

If you've followed the stock market even a bit, and I mean only a bit as I don't really own anything that's involved in it, you'll see that whatever actually happens in the economy has no bearing whatsoever on the stock market. Bad news has gone on and yet the stock market has gone up or good news happens and the stock market goes down. And for whatever it does, the experts and the traders and the analysts all go on the air to pontificate why it did what it did even if the entire reason why it went up could just be some coked up trader getting a manic over eager on a certain stock and causing a bunch of people to be caught up in his coked up mania. People are sheep and the stock market appears to be rather sheep like.

Which brings us to my main point, that the stock market has, for whatever reason, become the only indicator of how our economy is doing. If it's above 10,000, people say we're doing fine. It doesn't matter if there's higher levels of poverty or the infrastructure is crumbling or people seem to think Dancing With the Stars is something to care about and so people go about ignoring such things because the stock market is high.

But isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? That everybody's so concerned with jacking up the stock market that nobody's cared one way or the other as to what is jacking it up? One of the things that should be obvious about this whole economic mess is that one of the reasons why the stock market has been so high is that while the country has long since lost the ability to create much of anything other than iPhones or Guitar Player or Facebook, we don't actually create anything tangible. And those things that we do, like iPhones or Guitar Player are built elsewhere. The entire economy has, since probably Reagan, has been fueled by nothing but bubble after bubble after bubble. None of this has actually added to the country in any sort of way. Instead we've created this jerry-rigged financial system built on the proverbial house of cards that's finally fallen and the worst part of it is that any attempt to try and fix the jerry-rigged financial system is met with disapproval by the stock market because the people who jerry-rigged see any attempt to fix it as an attempt to keep them from jerry-rigging the damn thing further.

To help us get out of this mess, we're going to have to do either one of two things:

1)Accept and understand what got us into this mess, lower our expectations, and rebuild a foundation for which the country can grow in a real and meaningful way
2)Quickly find another bubble. And FAST. And if that is the decision, I suggest blankets with sleeves.