A couple of days ago, the U.S. Stock Market dropped a thousand points in a few minutes. I was watching the market reports as it happened, and had never seen anything like it. Another who saw it as it happened thought, “A nuclear war has started.”
In the following two days, lots of theories have emerged as to what caused the sudden slide. None of them were particularly encouraging, especially when stock owners realized that the value of several stocks had dropped to zero.
Since no one who knows what happened is talking about it, and those who are telling us what happened don’t know, the uncertainty has put more concern and gloom into what is, increasingly, a worrisome business.
One analyst said it was caused by the White House. The administration was supposedly striking back because Congress had not passed a bank take-over bill that it wanted, and decided to “teach ’em a lesson”. This may, or may not, be the case, but it makes as much sense as anything.
More conventional answers from the state-run media and their “news” services blamed the drop on “an errant trade”, “computerized selling”, “thin volume”, “high speed trades”, “automatic trade orders”, “the growth of electronic trading”, and the ever-popular “glitch”. As a result of the “explanations that don’t explain”, more investors are more worried than ever.
It’s a good time to remind us to recall the Catholic Fundamentalism adage, “It’s never a good idea to worship programmed entities. It’s always better to worship He Who programmed them.”
