March badness: Dead cats are bouncing
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In the aftermath of a market rally that now looks more and more like a "dead-cat bounce" (or a "Seinfeld rally") than a true sign of recovery, the blame game is intensifying.
AIG bonuses, Tim Geithner, Stewart vs. Cramer — that's entertainment. Now we have Barack Obama breaking new ground by becoming the first sitting president to grant an audience to Jay Leno's audience. And why not? Obama is cool and funny.
He's also the first president to fill out his March Madness NCAA brackets for ESPN. The nation's most powerful basketball player didn't just pick a winner, he filled out the whole damn bracket.
While Rome, Wall Street, Congress, and the White House burn. (See Josh Greenman's "The Obama Everywhere gamble.")
So which power center should be voted off the island: Wall Street or Washington?
A crowd of Wall Streeters listening to a debate on the issue this week blamed Washington more than themselves, of course.
But for entertaining quotes, see Nouriel Roubini's take on the debate. (And the transcript.)
Eternally glib, the NYU prof, sometimes known as the "party-boy economist," had this, among other things, to say:
We created a system which people expect, that the gains are going to be privatized, and the losses are going to be socialized; this is a welfare state for the rich, for the well-connected and for Wall Street. That's what happened, that's public policy."
And the recent stock-market rally? That was probably a dead-cat bounce. See Roubini's March 14 piece, "Reflections on the latest dead cat bounce or bear market sucker's rally."
Don't get pissed off, PETA. It's not a real cat, just as it wasn't a real rally. Investopedia gives a succinct definition of that term: "A temporary recovery from a prolonged decline or bear market, after which the market continues to fall."
