Monday, September 08, 2008

The CNBC Pessimism

MSNBC announced today that Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman were being dropped as anchors of of the channel, at least in part because of criticism of their possible bias -- yippee, I say!

Now maybe NBC should take a look at their financial news service, CNBC. Here is their headline around 4pm today, when the DOW was up almost 300 points:

"For the Markets, Bailout is Hardly a Game-Changer."

The story goes on to say,

"The government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has given investors at least a short-term reason to believe the worst has begun to pass, but it's hardly a game-changer...Market pros remain unconvinced that the rescue plan by itself will be enough to snuff out the Wall Street bears."

Of course, the first point is that to call this a bailout is a bit of a stretch -- with Fannie and Freddie stocks both down to less than a dollar per share, with almost 90% losses today.

But come on guys, the market is up 300 points. How you can you not say that that is a pretty strong vote of confidence in the takeover of the two GSE's? Worldwide, by how many hundreds of billions of dollars did stock markets go up today??

Of course, as one colleague pointed out, this massive increase in wealth could also be from the lead that McCain has taken in the polls and the closing of betting odds in some of the online political markets. I personally, however, attribute the stock market increases to Hank Paulson and his colleagues.

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