Bad News All Around

Generally, single, significant current events are recorded in these posts, but in the search for the one significant event for today, we are at a loss.  Generally, it's all bad.  Thus, its general negativity is what makes it significant.

Here is a list, however brief, of the major news items today:

--Last night, Asian stock markets dropped: the Nikkei (Japan) lost 1.3 percent; the Shanghai Composite (China) lost 1.6 percent.

--Europes' major indexes tanked:  the Stoxx Europe dropped 4.8 percent; the DAX (Germany) dumped 5.8 percent.

--The Dow shed 419 points, losing another 3.7 percent.

--408,000 new unemployment claims were filed last week, up 9,000 from the week before, and 8,000 more than expected.

--The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures inflation, was up .5 percent in July; Gas alone was up 4.7 percent.

--There are renewed fears of another global recession.

--A flash mob was formed in Germantown, Maryland to raid a local 7-Eleven.  It only took a few minutes, and they made off with hundreds of dollars of goods.  Police are at a loss as to what to do to prevent it from happening again.

--Dozens of Isrealis were either killed or injured in a series of roadside attacks near the Israeli-Egyptian border.

Although the list above is primarily econocentric, there just seems to be a sense, an intuition, if you will, that the future isn't looking so bright these days.  Even my girlfriend feels sad, for no apparent reason.  So much of the news today is ... so grim.

Those who studied U.S. History, might recall in those studies, how, weeks before the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor, a number of people are recorded to have felt a strange sense of foreboding.  They intuited that something, some catastrophic event was about to take place, though they knew not what.  Those who experienced that foreboding could certainly attribute it to certain causes--Europe was already in the midst of another Great War, and many felt that it was only a matter of time before United States serviceman would be called and shipped east. 

Perhaps it is merely because the economic news is so bleak; or perhaps that news itself is rarely positive, and that we see more of that negativity since beginning to research more of it for the purposes of this blog; but whatever the cause, we can relate, today, to the generation that witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, and their odd sense of coming calamity.  We certainly hope nothing catastrophic is on the horizon, that this intuition is misconstrued, or that it is merely a passing phase of dread in the attempt to understand the causes of current tragic events.  Yet, if the sum of today's news is any indication of a bleak future, we would do well to prepare for it, however we can.