Results tagged “dowjones”

You would think, from reading bulletins about the stock market's drop today--about how the Dow Jones decline rate mimics the Great Depression--that Western civilization was on the brink of extinction. To someone who hasn't bought stock or mutual funds (securities of any kind, for that matter) for at least a decade, this doesn't make sense. The closely followed Dow is an average of the prices of thirty stodgy, old-line industrial companies (out of tens of thousands of publicly traded enterprises). An artificial indicator like that is bound to fluctuate, and consider this: No one is forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy or sell anything; for every seller, there's a willing buyer. The Market goes up, the Market goes down. Don't let it get in your head.

The Dow Jones dropped 7.7 percent today, to 8,149, after a gradual run-up last week. Local heroes Microsoft and Boeing dropped to $18.61 (-1.61 percent) and $39.88 (-2.75 percent) respectively. We're officially in a recession--surprise! it's been a year already!--and are turning to survivalists for advice: "All true survivalists like yard sales."

Sightline's Alan Durning has a good post on the connection between spikes in gas prices and recessions. It's very topical on a day that the Dow exhibited tremendous volatility, gaining 936 points. Our economic pulse is shocky, and Durning argues that at least in part its because high oil prices "sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the US economy" the last five years. It's this economic suffocation--not just from gas at the pump, but from jumps in manufacturing and shipping costs--that's led people to fail to pay all those mortgages they could barely afford. Meet the pit bull of vicious circles.

We were downtown at Pacific Place for lunch (salmon chowder). It was a little less peopled--a quiet Monday--but what was a little odd was how subdued everyone was, like queasy rollercoaster riders. No one was laughing. No one was regaling buddies with a loud, "What I did last weekend" story or arguing sports. They spoke softly. Out on the street, a single unbalanced woman was screaming at no one in particular: "Fuck you, fuck all of you!" The traffic was quiet. There was a single horn as a driver tried to drive straight through a green left-turn signal. Way across the country, the Dow closed below 10,000, at 9,955.

It figures that on the same day the Dow sank below 10,000--its worst decline since...uh...last week--we'd also read that gas scooters and motorcycles are worse polluters than cars and SUVs. Thanks, Alan Durning! Sure, they're gas-sippers, but since you can't fit emissions equipment on the tiny little suckers, they're essentially like driving around a high-mpg leaf-blower. The EPA says driving some motorcycles 10 miles is as bad emissions-wise as driving a car 850 miles. We're going back to bed.

It wasn't just the Dow Jones setting records today; the NASDAQ index had its 3rd largest one-day decline ever by percentage, losing 9% of its value. Among the tech stocks taking a drubbing were locals Microsoft (-8.7%) and Amazon (-10.4%)--though Redmond might enjoy the schadenfreude of knowing that Apple closed down nearly 18%.

According to the Mariners, pitchers and catchers report in 18 minutes! So, as has become annual Seattlest tradition, we present this ode to spring training, by Ogden Nash (1902-1971).