Tending naturally to be a pessimist, having worried for years that 9/11 actually made folks artificially more positive about the economy (which should have stayed worse for longer — due to economic/business reasons unrelated to politics — but didn’t because everyone thought it was their patriotic duty to keep spending money they didn’t have, and anything negative was written off as artificially bad due to 9/11…), I now find myself pessimistic about (what seems to be) growing pessimism… “Plenty of economic data could sent [send?] North American stock markets tumbling”: important numbers are coming out this week and we shouldn’t expect many positive surprises. Combined with worries about Russia and Georgia, the psychological effects on markets could be quite combustive. The bad news isn’t the biggest problem; what makes bad news worse is panicking when we can’t understand or control it — as if we could go on indefinitely without occasional fires to burn off the all the dead brush that accumulates beneath new layers of economic and political development.
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