Surprise, surprise.

If Hell isn't breaking loose yet, there's at least an ominous cracking sound...

The TSX fell over 600 points today, its largest one-day drop since 9/11. That's alarming enough, but when you consider the market has shed more than 12 percent in just fourteen business days, you start to wonder where rock bottom might be...and the downward momentum becomes great enough that we'll reach it and start tunnelling.

The official explanation: "fears that the United States may be entering a recession". Hello? May be entering? Mr. Obvious, please pick up a white courtesy phone...

I'm not in the market to speak of--I work in a grocery store, after all--so I can look at this from an outsider's perspective and...I'm sorry, folks, but I have to laugh. It's either laugh, cry, or scream.
Look, I know Jack Squat about the economy, still, but I know two things that it seems the majority of credentialled, highly-paid finaciers have forgotten. One, economies are cyclical. What goes up must come down, and all that. Two, you can't just create money out of thin air...well, you can, but sooner or later you're going to be found out. The finding out is well underway now, and the consequences speak for themselves, as consequences so often do.

But it's the reaction that really amazes me: the huge collective huh? followed by what certainly appears to be sheer, unadulterated panic.

Um, people? They've been forecasting this for years. Sure, maybe somebody cried wolf a few too many times, but once that sub-prime mess started to ooze into the light, once the cries of yonder circling wolfpacks became audible, it must have taken supreme effort to ignore the warning signs. You'd have to have your heads buried deep in the sand--or at least the latest copies of US Weekly and Hello!--to miss them. (Interesting: Hello!'s circulation's up 54% over the past year, and Time's is down 17%. Not that Time is necessarily the best source for news out there, but it's a damn sight better than celebrity rag-mags.)

As for the panic, once again I must quote Blood, Sweat and Tears: What goes up/ Must come down. Do you get into a tizzy every night at sunset?

Unless...

Unless maybe--just maybe--the reason everybody has lost their freakin' minds is because they've just realized they lost their freakin' minds there for awhile, thinking they could get something for nothing. Maybe the thought has crossed a few brains that staking your entire economy on a buttload of derivatives isn't the wisest thing to do. It mght be that the entire house of cards is about to be--whoosh!--blown over. If that's the case...

...well, go ahead and panic if it makes you feel better.