ze sky, she notta fallin

Lileks doesn't look forward to today (edited).

...top-of-the-hour radio news with the newsreaders using their Important Concern inflection because G**-forbid the story should speak for itself. Then tomorrow there will be an editorial cartoon that has someone selling apples. Panic. Stupid, useless snowballing hysteria. I’m not worried about the economy at this point; I’m worried what people will do save it. Rebates! Oh, that’s grand. Nothing restores fundamental consumer confidence like shoving money in their hands and yelling SPEND IT! SPEND IT NOW! ON ANYTHING! THROW PILLOWS! STEEPLY DISCOUNTED HD-DVD PLAYERS! BLOWN-GLASS GEEGAWS! TRAILER HITCHES! BUCKETS OF PICKLES! IT DOESN’T MATTER! Or you could tax everyone more so they feel poorer, so they spend less, then wonder why retail sales are down, commercial property is soft, and business tax receipts have cratered.

Just leave it all alone, please. It’s like a cold. You can put it off and cover it up but you’re going to have three miserable shuddering days of congestion and hacking no matter what you do. Unless you take zinc, of course.

That’s it! Spray the markets with zinc!

I’m not an economist, but I’ve noted something interesting. Since we decided that ethanol would be the cure to our “addiction to oil,” we managed to bump up the cost of corn, encourage a shift to corn production, and raise the price of foodstuffs. Which fueled inflation fears. Now that we have increased inflation, we have a fear of a recession, which drives the price of oil down, since demand is expected to slump. The price of gas has gone down a quarter in the last ten days, and it’s idling in the low $2.8x range. As others have noted, the cure for $100 barrel oil is $100 barrel oil. It all works out. There’s a boom and then there’s a bust. Having lived through a few, it’s annoying to hear the same fargin’ end-of-the-world hairshirt orations, especially from those who have spent their entire lives walking around with a bucket of black paint and a brush looking for good news to deface...

We’re not even in a recession, but you’d think the morning sun was about to be blotted out by the rain of money managers hurling themselves out windows. Of course the news is bad. The news is always bad. Even the good news is bad, eventually. If they cured cancer tomorrow it would take a day before analysts worried about the impact on Medicare, what with people living so d*** long and all.