Is it me or does it seem like it’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard from Barack Obama? [Insert your Dick Cheney/Undisclosed location cliche here]. Sure, Obama is still all over the news every day but it’s more about what he will or won’t do rather then him actually doing or not doing something.
So today he holds a press conference announcing the grand prize winners of his “be a part of Barack Obama’s Hope Change Economic Team” contest that he’s been holding since before the election. I’ve never heard of any of these people. But according to the talking heads, they are all smart, bipartisan, and will stimulate the shit out of a mothafuckin’ economy.
How they will do this is unclear. Then again I’m not entirely sure that the talking heads really know who these people are either. The best part of today’s press conference was the “analysis” that the CNBC talking heads (I swear to god they had 8 heads on the TV screen at one time) provided afterward. They spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing what the Dow Jones was doing during different parts of the press conference as if the market was a sentient being. They noted that the market reacted well during the initial part of Obama’s statement, and that went down when he was vague about raising or lowering taxes.
Look, I don’t know a damn thing about the inner workings of the stock market. But after watching CNBC today, I don’t believe that anyone there does either. I am aware that the next President’s statements can have an effect on people’s confidence in his ability to handle the economy and what his plans may be. But I don’t think stock brokers on the floor of the NYSE are buying and selling stock after every sentence he utters in real time.
As of this moment, it looks like the Dow is going to be up for the day and that tells me that overall, people were encouraged by Obama’s statement and felt a little bit better about investing for today, at least. But the folks on CNBC would have you believe that people were watching this press conference and changing their retirement plans with every syllable. Truth be told, I don’t believe that the press conference had much influence on the stock market’s rebound today.
The pattern of the market violently dropping and then bouncing back some has been going on for quite some time now. Again, I don’t think that anybody really knows what is going on or what is going to happen tomorrow or an hour from now. But for those of us who are counting the days until Obama moves into the White House, it was nice to finally see him again.
