Blue Monday
Watch the top video from 6:00.
I live two hundred yards or so from the New York Stock Exchange, and use the gym next door. Since last October, there have periodically been camera crews outside, recording the slow motion implosion of the financial sector. But this morning, a bright sunny day with a clear blue sky there was no indication at all of the catastrophic events that were occurring to the financial system. Despite the fact that by this evening, the NYSE was practically flood lit.
Bloomberg today ran a slightly melodramatic piece that said that this was one of those days where ‘you remember where you were when…’. Well, I was outside the stock market, when the securities business was becoming extinct, and you wouldn’t have been able to tell it from any other day.
Although the stock market crash of 29 was a far more rapid, severe and dramatic affair, the real drama played out over a decade as the inertia of the effects of capital markets spilled into what even Greenspan calls ‘the real economy’. If you look closely at the footage, over and over again, I suspect that the 1929 crash appeared far less dramatic than people suggest now, even if the effects were severe.
BTW, watching BofA’s hugely impressive CEO, Ken Lewis, it is great shame that this country’s politicians aren’t of the same calibre.