5 day forecast
Dow doomsayers
Share with others:
The Post-Gazette should dump Paul Krugman and give his column to letter writer David M. Johns ("The Downward Dow," Nov. 10). So what if Mr. Krugman has a Ph.D., a Nobel Prize in economics and works at Princeton? He's got nothing on Mr. Johns, who has predicted a bleak future for the United States based solely on the performance of the Dow Jones industrial average on the day following the re-election of President Obama. He deserves more than a single paragraph in the letters to the editor section!
I'd love to hear his explanations for other significant movements of the Dow over the last several years. For example, how does he explain that the index is up 61 percent from the day President Obama took the oath of office in January 2009? Conversely, to what does he attribute the Dow's overall 25 percent decline from day one of the George W. Bush presidency to the last? That decline started 15 months before President Obama was inaugurated and culminated in a breathtaking drop of 43 percent from its all-time high of 14,164 in 2007. If it would help, Mr. Johns could check out the performance of the Dow the day after Bill Clinton took office -- it dropped 30 points. Just ignore the fact it more than tripled during his two terms.
Perhaps Mr. Johns could write about the tin foil hat futures market -- I predict an uptick in demand from all those people who believe that only a Republican president is good for the economy.
DAN SPARVERO
Penn Hills
First Published November 17, 2012 12:00 am
