Welcome to Market Moods!

When I first got into the business of writing about the financial markets, it was the summer of 2000.  Seven years later, in the fall of 2007, I was offered and accepted a position as senior editor of TradingMarkets. Given how the markets behaved shortly after those two career moves, it might be said that if you hear that I'm getting a new job, it might be a good time to go into cash.

Interestingly, I began writing a blog in 2003 called moodmovesmarkets.  At the time, my goal was to chronicle what I suspected would be the discontents of the bear market that had begun a few years previous in the wake of the dot.com bust.  Bear markets, as I and many others have explained before me, are not just markers of mean times for those who own and trade stocks.  Rather, bear markets - especially big ones - reflect what economist and money manager Marc Faber calls "excursions into pessimism", bringing with them a number of social ills and dislocations that are reflected in everything from politics to pop culture.  As I wrote in an inaugural post for moodmovesmarkets back in the summer of 2003:

"The most recognizable athlete during the bull market years of the 1980s and 1990s was pro basketball player Michael Jordan, a champion's champion who won six NBA championship titles with a grace, strength and single-minded determination that has raised the bar for championship athletes ever since. The most recognizable athlete of the bear market 1970s was the professional heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, whose greatest achievements involved winning back his championship titles after losing them twice. Unlike Jordan--a legendary product endorser who once quipped that he would defer from making a partisan political comment because "Republicans buy sneakers, too"--Ali was a controversial figure throughout his entire career--from his surprising underdog victory in 1964 and subsequent conversion to Islam to his refusal to be inducted into the military draft in 1967, to his boastful and, at times, vicious taunting of opponents ... "

Four years later, we find ourselves a year into another bust, one that will probably be far more dislocating and destructive than the implosion of the dot.coms ever could have been.  Who would have thought a year ago that Lehman Brothers would go up in smoke like so much flash paper?  Who would have thought that the simple pursuit of the American dream - home ownership - could turn into a mania that would rock the world's largest and most powerful economy?  Who could have anticipated that a call for "change" and sacrifice from a relatively obscure Chicago politician would become a rallying cry for millions of Americans who only a few years ago were obsessively engaged in the classic late-capitalist pasttimes of conspicuous consumption and pop culture infatuation?

My wager is that we can anticipate these sorts of changes - or, at a minimum, better understand them when they arrive.  As I have for the past five years with moodmovesmarkets, this blog, Market Moods will continue to look at how our excursions into pessimism - and into optimism when those times come - help shape the way we see and interact with the world.  From politics to pop culture, from sports to the stock market, each week I'll try and put into context the often random-seeming and disassociated phenomena that often tells us more about who we are and what we're feeling than we ever seem to be able to admit at the time.  More often than not, I hope this will be an entertaining journey – and maybe even one that we will find ourselves profiting from in ways more material than sublime. 

Thank you for stopping by Market Moods.  I look forward to watching the world with you.