EXCITING TIMES.

EXCITING TIMES. Kids, I suggest you watch the finance section of Yahoo news over the next couple weeks because these are exciting times. These weeks will be referred to the next time there is a financial panic (and there will be others). One way to make the watching interesting is to think of this as a contest between the financial sector and the “real” sector (as we call the nonfinancial sector). People generally think that the prognosis for the financial sector is grim. The credit markets are frightened. At the same time, most people think that the prognosis for the world economies remains good. The first two paragraphs of this article (all that is available) illustrate how different the views are. One expert is quoted later in the article as saying, “People in financial markets always think they are more important than the real world.” There is a lot at stake for a lot of people if it turns out that in these circumstances the real world is not more important than the financial markets.