Ethics for pleasure and profit
Say, here's a good way to predict the US stock market. It has nothing to do with women's hem-lines, baseball's world series or the whereabouts of Louis Rukeyser, host of a popular American television show called "Wall Street Week".
All eyes were on Alan Greenspan this October 15 as Wall Street skidded to the end of its worst week in a decade. The US Federal Reserve chairman had given an impeccably even-handed speech at dinner the previous night to a conference of bankers studying the ins and outs of risk measurement. Indeed, several of those present remarked that, after a day of debating the intricacies of fancy models, the chairman had scarcely said anything at all. It was another classic performance of mumbling from the Fed. Yet, the word went out, from that time and place, to sell. Asian markets dropped almost immediately, before the sell-off spread overnight to Europe. Then, pessimism turned into near panic when a spurt in the US producer price index greeted traders just before Wall Street opened on Friday morning.