Wishful thinking

No surprise from the Drudge Report here. I mean, everybody knew that as soon as the program of bond-buying macroeconomic support (that'll be the "pump") was slowed, the hitherto rampaging stock market would go to hell, and we all know which Kenyan Keynesian socialist marauder to blame for that, don't we?

Well, except that "stocks" weren't "rocked" in any meaningful sense. As the revised hed (from about an hour after the first) points out, several stock indexes indeed "hit new highs." Which is interesting, because the Dow industrial index was pretty much at the same point for data point B ("hit new highs") as it was for point A ("stocks rocked"). No regular followers of the news world will be surprised to find that Matt Drudge makes stuff up, but it's kind of fun to catch him playing always-at-war-with-Eastasia in real time.

Other than that, so what? Well, it's interesting to look at how "the media" talk about economic data, because some of "the media" have taken to out-and-out fabrication as the standard for economic reporting. You're welcome, of course, to your own opinion about how central banks ought to behave, but if you're a regular visitor here, you probably have a fairly fixed idea about news organizations for which the same statistical development can leave the stock market "rocked" one moment and at "new highs" the next.

* The red type is one of those rare concessions Drudge makes to the multimedia era.