The waah!-waah!-waah! crowd

WEEKEND JOURNAL: "From Bear to Bull," by James Grant, Wall Street Journal, 19-20 September 2009.

Cool bit I loved:

To the English economist Arthur C. Pigous is credited a bon mot that exactly frames the issue. "The error of optimism dies in the crisis, but in dying it gives birth to an error of pessimism. This new error is not born an infant, but a giant."

The art of the long view, as my friend Peter Schwartz would say, is a skill of the optimist.

Comments

[Pfipps]

I do some financial stuff, and most of the pessimism is a cynical play for short term and day traders. There is a whole "legal" grey market that targets a group of people to buy or sell a class of stocks. The simplest is the pump and dump scheme of OTC and pink list stocks.

Simply put, higher volatility is what is needed for a day trader to make money....scare enough individual investors, take advantage of earnings reports and the actions of institutional investors, and you can make, or lose tons of money.