OK, I’m officially old. The market drops a thousand points in a matter of minutes, and instead of seeing the obvious humorthey’re now blaming the free fall on the so-called fat-finger syndrome — I see my 401(k) flashing before my eyes and am trying desperately not to weep.
This is how you know you’re old, circa 2010. My wife went to a dinner the other night, and all she and her friends could talk about was what the Greeks were doing to their retirement plans.
Back in the day, when my grandparents were talking about Greece, it meant they were planning to take a cruise to see the Parthenon. Now we’re talking about Greece because the Greeks are taking us on a very nasty ride.
The Greeks are killing me. It’s the Greeks and Wall Street, but it’s not like I had high expectations for Wall Street.
I used to love the Greeks. They gave us Homer, Aesop, the Greek chorus, the Cyclops, Plato’s cave, Oedipus and, much later, the Oedipus complex, Achilles’ heel, Zorba and, of course, the baklava at that pastry shop on Colfax near East High.
What’s not to love — I mean, other than the geometry?
And if they want to riot in the streets, that’s on them. It’s apparently a very Greek thing to do. I read that one of the big issues is that, in its new austerity plan, Greece plans to issue only 12 monthly checks a year to government workers instead of 14. I love a country that can turn 12 months into 14.
Still, it makes little sense to me why Greece’s budgetary problems have caused the stock market to stumble. I have read the analyses, and it’s apparently all about the euro and Germany and central banks and whatever else causes the markets to get the jitters.
But we have major budgetary problems of our own, and as far as I know, they weren’t doing anything particularly bad to Greece. I know we’re all interconnected and the world is flat — whatever that means — but how interconnected is our economy to Greece’s economy?
Whom do we have to worry about next — the Albanians?
Let me just say that for the first time in my life, I’m rooting for Troy.
But, of course, it’s not all the Greeks’ fault. The Greeks had nothing to do with the fact the market plummeted Thursday like Odysseus’ ship being sucked under by Charybdis (if you don’t get the reference, that’s why someone — not the Greeks — invented the Google).
No one is certain exactly what happened to the market or what caused the panic or if there ever was actual panic.
People think the free fall might have been set off by a typo — that someone typed in “B” for billion instead of “M” for million, and the computers were the ones that panicked. I’m not sure if that’s what they mean when they’re talking about the fat-finger problem — somebody hitting the wrong key.
Others are calling it a glitch. A glitch, in my view, is a minor malfunction. When 9 percent of the stock market disappears in 30 minutes, that’s a calamity.
Procter & Gamble went down from just over $60 a share to $39.37 in seconds. Accenture went down from $40 a share to one penny a share. They both bounced back, and the Dow was down only 348 points in the end — as if that were just a mere blip.
We know something went terribly wrong. Wall Street, which had stumbled the previous few days, was nervous. Maybe the brokers think Greek anarchists can bring down the whole system. I figured only the Greek anarchists could possibly think that.
If I’m thinking conspiracy, I’m wondering if Goldman Sachs wasn’t betting short again. But it may have been another bank that was at fault. Sources told CNBC that Citigroup may have made the error that caused the computers to sell, sell, sell. I know I saw something very similar happen in the movie “Trading Places,” which is where I learned most of what I know about the market.
On her blog, Megan McArdle, the financial analyst for the Atlantic, gave a list of possible reasons for the moments of market insanity.
She wrote that it could be the market knows something we don’t. Or it could be that the market doesn’t. She said maybe “some idiots panicked when (mega-bond investor) Mohamed El-Erian said that Greek contagion was on the verge of spreading. One of the more comforting explanations; if so, the idiots seem to have thought the better of it.”
For most of my life, I didn’t care what the market did. I had 401(k) accounts, but I rarely checked the balances because what was the point real ly? The market went down sometimes, the market went up sometimes, and someday I’d retire, but not any time soon.
Now I find myself reading Paul Krugman, who says that however bad you think things are in Greece right now, they’re probably going to get worse.
Maybe. All I know is that if someone had advised Greece to buy P&G at 39 Thursday, we’d all be out of this mess.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
