Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Cheney Escaped, Blogger Was Down, So Was the Stock Market



Blogger still is, if I use Firefox. What a weird world this cyberspace is.

Not as weird as the stock market:

A wave of frantic selling engulfed the world's financial markets today after the biggest fall in the Chinese stock market in a decade triggered a domino effect across Asia, Europe and North America.

Fears about the health of the US economy and sabre-rattling from the White House about an air assault on Iran's nuclear plants were heightened by an almost 9% plunge in Shanghai's benchmark index, amid hints from Beijing that it was planning action to control the speculation that had driven the bourse to a record high this week.

Puncturing the recent mood of optimism that has seen financial markets across the globe recover from the post 9/11 bear market, the sell-off in Shanghai spread rapidly to Hong Kong and Tokyo, before moving westwards to Europe.

By the close of business in the City, London's index of blue-chip shares - the FTSE 100 - closed almost 150 points down on the day at 6,286.1, with the fall of 2.31% the sharpest since last June.

That is from the U.K. Guardian. Here in the U.S. I read a different explanation of the events, mostly centering on the Chinese market alone. I also hear a lot of soothing talk about an overdue-correction and a glitch and how the automatic trading programs caused the sudden strong drop.

Nobody suggests that there is any connection between the stock market plunge and Cheney's hair-thin escape from the bombing in Afghanistan which took the lives of many other people. I'm not suggesting this, either, but need to put the Cheney thing somewhere on the blog today, because it occurred to me that if the flytrap theory about terrorism (that we need to keep them busy abroad so they don't find us here) is correct, it would seem that having Cheney abroad permanently would keep the rest of us safe. - Just kidding.