So I'm seeing stories in the news like this one talking about how the war announcement is pulling the US out of a recession. All of the articles have a similar chart, showing a climb this morning after things were “confirmed” and then a levelling off at about 8000.
The charts, to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at implies an “I guess it turned out for the best, maybe Bush was right” response, but it ignores the fact that this is a meaningless change. At the end of the week, the market dipped because of uncertainty. Now it's levelled because of certainty. To illustrate, here's some Dow graphing (the Nasdaq looks similar):
On the left is a one year chart — you can see the Dow dropping to 2/3 of its value a year ago (and that's just one year; scare yourself more with longer history if you want to see the Bush legacy in action). On the right (the pink background thing) is today's chart. The small part of the pink is there to show scale, and the green line is today's change adjusted to match vertical scale.
I really hope most Americans can see through lies like this… It's really quite dispicable for the media to mislead readers like this… Oh, and what are the odds that this story (remind you of anything?) will get any press in the US? I guess it only counts when the reds are driving the tanks, right?
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