Otterblog

Wall Street. Main Street. Fourth Street. Your street. We essentially had two disasters during the past few days. Ike and the disaster unfolding on Wall Street. One of the continuous discussions in our newsroom is how to cover and present these stories. Ike is visual. The shots of wiped out houses along the Gulf. Folks lined up for drinking water. The piles of debris. Wall Street is different. Essentially money just disappeared in the sense that stock that was worth x amount on Friday was worth only half that amount on Monday. And the images are subdued.  The investment bankers walking into emergency meetings over the weekend. Lehman Brothers employees filing out of a building. Brokers in Mumbai, Frankfort and New York, with that weary exasperation on their face that needs no caption.

Financial stories of this magnitude are difficult to capture. Part of the problem is that they are really complex. We get hurricanes. The wind blows. The rain falls. The tide surges. Your house is gone. But the subprime mortgage disaster is complicated and the reasons are diffuse. It’s true that most of us are married to the market in a way that didn’t exist a generation ago. The Dow Jones average is as important a number in our lives as our blood pressure or cholesterol count. It’s our retirement. Our nest egg. Our money to do social good, send kids to college etc.

The media tends to focus on the Dow because it’s such a bellwether of the economy, Up is good. Down is bad. Way down. Very bad. And try as people might to put a 449.36 drop in context, i.e. a 4.1 percent drop, the raw number is just that—Raw. We’ve had a lot of conversations in recent weeks about how to cover economic news—particularly the bad news that seems to be most prevalent. As an earlier post noted, there is one view that the bad news is creating more bad news, call this another version of the trickle down effect.

My guess: The hurricane season will be over before the storm season on Wall Street ends.