Ebola and the fear factor

*Sigh* What scares you more, Ebola or the flu? (Poll) Jumpin' Jebus on a stick! I took the poll, and when I did influenza was by an enormous stretch, the more scary of the two. Polls like the above scare me more than nearly all pathogens, as questions like the above are as likely as a novel lethal pathogen to cause widespread panic. Journos need be mindful as to just how fear ridden the average US citizen would seem to be.

From the saner side of journalism..Let’s get a grip on Ebola fear in U.S. Weird. Talk about two polar opposites.There are sane people left that can see the ebola issue in the US for what it really is...a non-starter as far as widely dispersed illness and death are concerned.

HuffPo is back to being a sad Internet rag by assisting in spreading the fear. What the butty 'ell is wrong with my fellow citizens? "Up To 18 Exposed To U.S. Ebola Patient, Including Children." What the deuce? Oh no, not CHILDREN! There was a damned good reason why I did not like to link to any of HuffPo's hard hitting journalism. It is because HuffPo sucks as a source of rational discourse.

There has been lots of chatter today attempting to link the US stock markets dive to ebola fears. Whether or not this is true will forever remain speculative. One cannot take a very complex system like the big three US stock markets and pin a single, non-transformative event such as, oh, I don't know, an ebola scare perhaps, and make sweeping statements about market activity.

The US stock markets were pretty highly valued in January of this year. Since then, the major indices have not deflated. Quite the contrary. So, we have a very mature bull market that has weathered lots of headwinds, it will not continue to rise indefinitely. Nor is it likely to spend lots of time meandering in a narrow trading range. Forget ebola and irrational exuberance for a moment. The market is simply undergoing a series of actions bringing the markets closer to the mean.

Lofty evaluations, and lots of profit to be locked in are the things that money managers--which in the short term are almost all simply complex algorithms that are just programmed into computerized trading systems--use as buying and selling tools. In the very short term it is pretty easy to see why individual equities rise and fall. It is almost always computers doing the trading. When there are more buyers than sellers, an equity rises in price. When the inverse occurs, the equity falls in value. The only thing that can be confidently stated about today's market action is this: there were more motivated sellers in the aggregate than there were buyers.

It is simple supply and demand. Tomorrow things may be different. Will "the markets" have 'decided' overnight that the threat of ebola has lessened? Nonsense. This bull market is roughly five and a half years old. All the talk about fear does not equate to lower equities prices. Markets almost always advance despite the fear of loss. In large part this is why removing emotion from the investment process provides positive results.

Oh, I am not a great stock picker as far as timing of events are concerned. Over the long haul my record has been much better.

One more..Ebola Phobia? 5 Reasons Why You Should Not Panic Over This Virus. *sigh* Am I the only person that is certain that if you tell a person not to panic that that is likely to cause a person to panic? The piece is actually very reassuring if you take the time to read and digest it. I suspect that most people will see "ebola" and "panic" and that will freeze their ability to reason.

Just when I thought that this one case of ebola would not escalate any further: Dallas Ebola patient vomited outside apartment on way to hospital. *sigh* It is not hard to see that the old news adage "If it bleeds, it leads" has special meaning at the junction of hemorrhagic fevers and main street, USA.

I was sort of listening to the evening news a bit ago, and yep, the press seems to know that today's stock market action was all about ebola fears. Although often mis-attributed to Lenin, the phrase "useful idiots" seems to precisely sum up the media-stupidity complex that has again reared its ugly head in knee-jerk response to the latest ebola fancy. I am literally shaking my head in disgust over the lapdog response to a crisis that is not on our shores.

Given the numbers of infected and the geographic span of the outbreak it seems almost a given that the US will see another infested person or two before this plague ends. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt will then reign.

Yet there is more concerning US ebola patient zero. This man, a Liberian national made it into country due to human error. Brother.