Here's what I don't get:
Chris Matthews has just called the Dow Jones Industrial aggregate Obama's scoreboard.
I have been watching the DJIA, and have discovered that it doesn't really seem to accurately reflect the state of the economy for anyone but the investor class.
Here's how I have come to see it -- and I am perfectly happy to be corrected when wrong.
It seems that the DJIA is really only a scoreboard for what the rich kids think about what the Big O's administration is doing. When it looks like they might have screwed the pooch so badly that short-term receivership, aka what I've heard widely called nationalization is coming to bear, then they get the hell out of the market because otherwise they'll be wiped out. (I know little, but have read that they're not precisely the same thing.) Basically, the DJIA tanks on the performance of the financial stocks because the rich kids are cashing out while they can still feather their nests on the back of taxpayers who are already propping up the value of the stocks they hold.
So...when the Obama administration takes regulatory moves, or makes moves to save what's apparently otherwise a moribund, under-capitalized banking industry -- and acts in ways that he and his advisers see to be in the interest of the stability greater nation and the broader economy -- the DJIA tanks.
I know the Dow Jones is not entirely composed of financial stocks. I also know there are many Average Moes (I can't use Average Joe anymore - Non-Joe the Non-Plumber ruined that phrase) with pension funds and retirement funds that are tied up in this mess, and that perhaps some of those fund managers are also getting out of the financials.
But I can't help getting this feeling that really, the Dow Jones is perhaps not the best barometer of What All This Means for the majority of us, and What We All Think.
I can't help feeling like Chris Matthews is sitting up there on his rich a$$ in desperate need of a ride on the Clue Line of the city bus system, still thinking that Wall Street has any connection with Main Street.
Please feel free to set me straight.
UPDATE: As straight as I can be set, anyway. So I like the point someone made that the DJIA is a 'leading indicator' -- meaning that where it goes, the economy in general may have a tendency to follow. Is that true? If it is, are we following it straight to Hell?