"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, August 4, 2011

"Pricing In" the Accelerating Doom




UPDATE:  250 points was hopeful a couple of hours ago.   We're now in range of having a really bad day.  Dow is down 470 points.


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The efficient markets hypothesis holds that the stock market "prices in" all available information about the economy, even though no individual can possibly know all available information... the market, in other words, is smarter than any individual.   (Hear that, Mr. President?)

Well, the market for the past two weeks has apparently been "pricing in" the fact that the debt ceiling deal would largely be a joke, that the governing class is dysfunctional, and that we still have Obama for another eighteen months.   Today the markets are tanking again, down 250 plus points when I last looked.   I think they are "pricing in" tomorrow's jobs report for July, which promises to be horrible.  

In other words, strap yourselves in.   We've gone over the top of the roller coaster and gravity is taking over.   And gravity, as my dad would say, "if you had taken Physics," is a form of acceleration.

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