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It's A Deal

By Tom Granahan, IDD Magazine

September 9, 2008

Good To Be Back

Random thoughts and second thoughts after a refreshing two-week hiatus...

* I'm not much for politics, but the next two months are going to be fun. That said, I think I side with the bumper sticker I recently saw that read, "Anyone Else for President."

* Did talk of Lehman's demise seemingly dry up because the brokerage miraculously cured itself, or because no one was around in late August to further fan the rumor flames?

* While my football team has won a handful of "NFL Championships" (all well before my time), it has never won a Super Bowl, yet I look forward to the start of the NFL season more than anything all year. Am I loyal, or just plain stupid?

* I read somewhere not long ago that fear, as it relates to investing, is 2.5 times more powerful than greed. Color me skeptical about how that can be quantified (it surely wasn't a survey of pro athletes), but it might explain this: When the bond insurers were in deep doodoo earlier this year, they were going to take down the global financial system as we know it, given their ties to Wall Street's banks. Now that the monolines are in somewhat better shape, the good news regarding the bond insurers hasn't been moving the I-banking needle in the other direction too much.

* Saw Sarah Palin's speech the other night and was pretty impressed with her oratory skills. It had me thinking: If you hate President Bush largely because he "can't speak" (as I so often hear), you have to love Palin, right? Somehow me thinks that won't be what we hear from W's detractors.

* I had to chuckle recently when I saw that the stock market was down because the price of oil was lower. According to the account I read, the concern centered around how falling oil prices signaled a global economic slowdown. So, for about a year all we heard about was the devastating impact of higher oil on the US economy, and in the few weeks that oil has retreated it's now turned to bad news. Maybe fear is 2.5 times more powerful than greed. Or maybe our need to pin every 0.2% move in the stock market every day to something so specific is a waste of time.

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Tom Granahan

Tom Granahan is the Editor of IDD. He has more than 15 years of financial-journalism experience, having written about the stock market for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal for several years. He also supervised the Newswires' U.S. bureaus, and was the founding editor of Dow Jones Market Talk, which some consider to be one of the earliest forms of financial-news blogging. He graduated with a BA in journalism from Temple University in his hometown of Philadelphia.

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