I can hardly watch CNBC. I can remember watching it constantly back in 1998 and 1999. It was on a good portion of the time at the PRO Sports Club in Bellevue. All those Microsofties who worked out at the club had elaborate spreadsheets written in Excel, but really burned into their brain. I can still estimate the tax impact on a given level of income--like that!

Obviously, the late 1990s weren’t really about investing for a large number of people. To them, the stock market was a huge lottery that almost always paid you for playing. The coolest people flipped IPOs. Others bought the stocks of the day mentioned early on CNBC, then sold after lunch. Sadly, real investors tried to follow the buy and hold strategy that seemed to work for so long, and saw smaller returns than the gamblers. Still, do you know any day traders today?

It’s hard to see when the current negative psychology will turn. The business reporting in the 1970s and that of today seem eerily similar--there’s almost no good news, and what good news there is doesn’t matter.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I think that there are a few signs that could point to a turn-around--when and if these events occur are open questions:

• Coalition forces find the body of bin Laden and his top henchmen. Despite denials in the Arab world, the identities of the remains are established beyond a shadow of a doubt. I wonder what the market reaction to the discovery of Hitler’s body was back in 1945?

• The FBI, CIA and the agencies in the Department of Homeland Security (more on this below) stop the attack that Al Queda must be planning for the 9/11 anniversary.

• Accounting and brokerage/investment banking reforms are signed into law. Of course, the people in the agencies entrusted with the new powers must be competent and the agencies funded sufficiently to do the job.

• Some high profile cheats go to Attica, or some similar prison without a putting green.

• The Department of Homeland Security is formed. By the way, could that name be any lamer? How about calling it the United States Security Agency? Or the Department for the Protection of American Freedom? Homeland seems so Russian—they referred to their country as “the Motherland”. It's sad that one of the major impediments to the passage of legislation to create the agency is a provision that the President wants that would allow agency employees to be fired. Imagine, firing someone because they couldn't do their job. The union that represents government employees has made it all but impossible to get rid of incompetents, and it looks like they plan to oppose this provision "vigorously"

• The elections conclude this fall. I think that this cycle will surprisingly bitter and cynical, but the bitterest and most cynical may be surprised—at their losses. I believe that the public is weary of politics, and wants a government that really does work together for the common good without demagoguery.

Of course, people will feel better--at least for a couple of hours--when the next Tolkien installment comes out at the end of the year. The title has nothing to do with the WTC, as anyone who’s read the trilogy knows.