The news networks that cried wolf

Aside from video-taping people walking the streets wearing “The End Is Near” Sharpied onto poster-board, talking heads are spouting double-dip recession as loudly as they can in the wake of a 10% loss on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a big stock market indicator) in the 2nd quarter of 2010.

The infamous double-dip. The thing that gets someone else’s spit all up in your honey mustard sauce. That’ll teach you for sharing the McNuggets.

Well, call me the blind optimist, but I am royally sick of hearing about America’s inevitable future plunge into the recesses of economic oblivion. Yes, I will be the first to admit that we’ve clearly hit a patch of soft economic data. The jobs report (beginning with the ADP jobs report which already sucked at the time of writing and finishing with Thursday’s jobless claims and Friday’s payroll employment reports) is, as our Spanish-speaking friends say, muy no bueno. Our nation’s gross domestic product was also recently revised downward to a modest 2.7% growth in Q1 ‘10.

But to debunk the doomsday theories kids and kidettes, realize it’s a bunch of scared, overly threatened fund managers running the markets in wildly turbulent political times amidst an international debt crisis. Things are going to be a tad choppy coming out of this quagmire. And news networks sell a hell of a lot of advertising space when they’re predicting Armageddon prematurely.

Ask yourself: have you seen a significant change in those around you in the past 6 months? About the same number of unemployed friends? People settling into a more conservative, maintainable pattern of spending? Same old ‘We’re broke, but we’re happy!’ jokes floating around?

Yeah. We’ve flattened out. We’re not plummeting to our doom. We’re chillin’. Recouping.

And just what is the major catalyst behind this latest market correction? Crappy numbers coming out of China. Their industry has evidently slowed down dramatically. Well, NO KIDDING. Customer Numero Uno (that’s us, people) has tightened up the ol’ bootstraps. Get a clue.

In other news , evidently Larry King is retiring. I’d probably care if I was older.

USA got beat by Ghana 2-1 in overtime, punting us corner-kick style from the World Cup. I’d probably care if I was... I dunno, not American? 3rd World-ican, maybe? I’m just glad to be able to permanently remove the word Vuvuzela from my mental dictionary. Good riddance, evil bee noise.

Hurricane Alex is slowing down the Gulf oil clean-up effort, but Americans have such short attention spans that we’ve already forgotten about it anyway. By the way, just for grins and giggles, go ahead and back your truck into a fire hydrant and watch the subsequent plume of water that comes up. Yeah. That’s going on at the bottom of the friggin’ ocean, only way bigger and it’s oil. Totally awesome.

And, to close on a happy note, massive financial regulation is going to be upon us once the Senate gets their act together. I assure you I will drone on about this for a good couple of newsletters, so for now let’s just say that Wall Street is probably going to be pissed. Fun times.