Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:
The number one single today in 1970:
The Associated Press reports:
Investor fears about higher interest rates escalated into rapid, computer-generated selling Monday that wiped out all the market’s gains for the year. At one point, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 1,000 points in less than an hour, and it ended with its worst day in more than six years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 is now down nearly 8 percent from its record high, set a little more than a week ago.
Market professionals warn that the selling could continue for a bit. But many are also quick to say they see no recession looming, and they expect the strengthening global economy and healthy corporate earnings to help stock prices recover.
“The reasons for the increase in rates is the stronger economy,” said Ernie Cecilia, chief investment officer at Bryn Mawr Trust. “The reasons are positive. It’s not as if something like 2008 or financial Armageddon is coming.”
The trigger for the sell-off came at the end of last week when a government report showed that wages across the country rose relatively quickly last month. While that’s good for workers, traders took it as a signal that higher inflation may be on the way, which could push the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates more quickly than expected. Higher rates not only make it more expensive for people and companies to borrow, they can also drive investors away from stocks and into bonds.
The sell-off Monday was so steep that some market-watchers blamed automated trading systems. These systems are programmed to buy and sell based on several variables, and they may have hit their sell triggers following the first wobble for stock prices after an unusually placid run.
That may mean even more volatility in the coming days, something that investors haven’t had to deal with during a blissful year-plus of record-setting returns. Before Monday, the S&P 500 index had gone a record period of time — roughly 400 trading days — without a drop of even 5 percent.
Monday was also the first day in office for the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, and investors are wondering how closely he will stick with the low interest-rate policies set by his predecessor, Janet Yellen.
Still, many market-watchers said they remain optimistic that stocks will recover.
Despite worries about interest rates, they still see a recession as a long shot. With economies growing around the world, profits for U.S. businesses are expected to continue rising, and stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate earnings over the long term.
“The rate worries have been the trigger” for the stock market’s swoon, said Melda Mergen, deputy global head of equities at Columbia Threadneedle. “But fundamentally, we don’t see any new news. It’s earnings season, the time that we get more direct feedback from our companies, and we don’t see any concerns.”
More than half the companies in the S&P 500 have told investors how they performed in the last three months of 2017, and most have topped analysts’ expectations, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Even more encouraging is that more than three quarters of them made more revenue than expected, which means it’s not just cost-cutting and layoffs that are allowing companies to earn more.
The White House cited some of those trends Monday and said “long-term economic fundamentals … remain exceptionally strong.”
President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessors, bragged repeatedly about stocks as the market rose. Monday, he avoided the topic as they plunged.
During the bull market of the last year, Trump complained that the media weren’t giving him credit for record highs in securities values.
“I mean, it’s something that’s pretty amazing,” he said to a group of mayors last month, in characteristic remarks, citing an estimate of $8 trillion in added wealth.
He also has said that the market would have lost 50 percent of its value had Hillary Clinton won the election, a claim that he repeated publicly during a recent speech to global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The assertion is impossible to prove or disprove.
Trump’s comments came despite frequent reminders from fact checkers and others that stocks began rising during the tenure of former President Barack Obama. In his administration, Obama and his aides were especially careful to avoid making comments about the market, for fear that the president would be blamed when it fell, as markets inevitably do.
During Monday’s market plunge, Trump was delivering a speech touting his tax cuts at a factory in Cincinnati, calling employees to the stage to discuss the gains they expected to make as a result of changes in the tax laws and what they intended to do with bonus checks they were receiving.
Trump did not mention the falling market, but as he bragged about the soaring economy, all three cable news channels airing the speech displayed graphics showing the market dropping in real time. As the speech wore on and stocks continued falling, all three — including Trump-friendly Fox News — pulled away from the speech entirely to report on the Dow.
If the stock market does indeed bounce back, though, many market-watchers expect returns to be more muted than in prior years because prices have already climbed so high. The S&P 500 is up nearly 292 percent since bottoming in early 2009.
And investors should remember that drops like those of the past two days aren’t a unique occurrence for stocks. They’re inherently risky investments, and investors should be prepared to see drops of 10 percent. Such declines happen so regularly that analysts have a name for them: a market correction.
Yesterday’s record drop totaled 4.5 percent, which is not remotely close to a record. The Black Monday 1987 drop was 22.61 percent, and those 508 points were recovered in a year. The Black Tuesday 1929 drop was 12.82 percent, followed a day later by another 11.73-percent drop and a week later by a 9.92-percent drop. In the two months before and after the 2008 election, the Dow Jones dropped 2,870 points over four days. Even with the drops of last week and Monday, the Dow Jones has gained 6,000 points since Election Day 2016.
Investors should look at the long term, not what happened yesterday or last week, and look at their own financial situations instead of what the news media reports.
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1982 …
… from the number one album, the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”:
How a Super Bowl ends from the perspective of the winner …
… and the loser:
At least the Eagles’ announcers (including play-by-play man Merrill Reese, who finally got to call a Super Bowl win after 41 seasons and two losses) could have said “Let the rioting begin!”
Purdue University president Mitch Daniels writes to Condolezza Rice:
That invitation to speak on our campus still stands, but I see that you’ll be a little too busy this spring, now that you’ve accepted yet another “service opportunity” as chair of the new commission tasked by the NCAA to help it reform college basketball. You’ve always been a sucker for a good cause; and if ever a cause qualified, this one does.
When the FBI revealed its findings about the corrupt connections among shoe companies, agents, a few big-time college programs and coaches, and the Amateur Athletic Union or AAU (the first “A” increasingly looks like a misnomer), no one near the sport was shocked. The existence of this part of the cesspool has been in plain view for years. Those in a position to stop the scandals spawned by the “one-and-done” era — in which many top-tier players were required to enroll in college for one year before bolting for the NBA — have been either powerless to do so or actively interested in perpetuating the status quo.
When it was discovered that, at what we’ve always considered an academically admirable school, championships had been won by teams loaded with players who took completely phony classes, most of us were sincerely shocked. We were stunned again when, after years of cogitation, the NCAA delivered a penalty of . . . nothing. It was a final confession of futility, confirming the necessity of this special commission, if any meaningful change is going to happen from the collegiate end.
If the NCAA is impotent to stop the abuses, the NBA is all but an unindicted co-conspirator. The current arrangement works out beautifully for the league: It gets a free minor league player development system, a massively televised showcase for its next round of stars, and one less argument with a players union that prefers to limit, through its ineligible-until-age-19 rule, the number of competitors for the few hundred NBA roster spots. The league has every incentive to keep dragging its feet, so the most promising avenue for reform is to make the college game inhospitable to NBA exploitation and the rotten collusion that the one-and-done world fosters.
As for solutions, one can start by observing that almost no change could make things worse. I don’t pretend to know the single best answer, but it’s not hard to list a number of possibilities.
We could require a “year of readiness,” meaning that freshmen could practice but not play while they became acclimated to college life. This was the NCAA rule for many decades, and it makes great sense unless a “student” really has no intention of pursuing a real education.
Or the NCAA could simply use the rule already in effect for baseball, which gives young aspirants a choice between going professional straight from high school or entering college and staying a minimum of three years. Either of these approaches separates those seriously interested in higher education from those forced by the current system to pretend they are.
Another idea would be to allow players to depart early for the NBA, but the scholarships they received would be required to remain vacant for the balance of their four-year terms. Coaches who want to chase that next championship with full-time players masquerading as students could do so, but the following few seasons might be tough with rosters filled with walk-ons.
I’m convinced the college game would be more, not less popular, if a handful of would-be pretend students, whose names fans barely get a chance to know, instead went straight from high school to some sort of professional league. Doing so would certainly bring more parity and fairness to the college game. The play would still be amazingly athletic — most of us fans would not be able to tell the difference — and schools with genuine academic and conduct standards would no longer be at such a competitive disadvantage.
It’s startling how concentrated the phenomenon is. In the past five years, 45 percent of all “five-star” recruits, and 58 percent of all one-and-dones, have gone to just five schools. Our entire 14-member Big Ten conference, by contrast, has had 9.2 percent of the first category and 6.4 percent of the latter, collectively. One could tell conferences like ours that if we don’t like today’s situation, we can just establish our own rules, but unilateral disarmament never seems like a good idea.
It troubles me to give up on my friends and neighbors at the NCAA, but when the FBI beats you to a monstrously obvious problem in your own backyard, you’re clearly never going to fix it on your own.
So thanks for serving, Condi, and best of luck. If you thought Iranian sanctions or North Korean nukes were hard problems, wait until you try this one. And take your time about that invitation. Go save us from ourselves.
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 2006, the Rolling Stones played during the halftime of the Super Bowl:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1967 was “The Monkees”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1978:
Today in 1959, a few hours after their concert at the <a href=”http://www.surfballroom.com”>Surf Ballroom</a> in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson got on a Beechcraft Bonanza in Mason City, Iowa, to fly to Fargo, N.D., for a concert in Moorhead, Minn.
The trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, were part of the <a href=”http://www.history-of-rock.com/winter_dance_party.htm”>Winter Dance Party Tour</a>, a 24-city tour over three weeks, with its ridiculously scheduled tour dates connected by bus.
Said bus, whose heater broke early in the tour, froze in below-zero temperatures two nights earlier between the scheduled concert in the Duluth, Minn., National Guard Armory, and the next scheduled location, the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay.
Holly’s drummer had to be hospitalized with frostbite in his feet, and Valens also became ill. The tour got to Green Bay, but its scheduled concert in Appleton that evening was canceled.
After the concert in Clear Lake, Holly decided to rent an airplane. Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, gave his seat to the Big Bopper because he was sick, and Valens won a coin flip with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup. Dion DiMucci chose not to take a seat because the $36 cost equaled his parents’ monthly rent.
As he was leaving, Holly told Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”
Shortly after the 12:55 a.m. takeoff, the plane crashed, instantly killing Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot.
The scheduled concert that evening went on, with organizers recruiting a 15-year-old, Robert Velline, and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee went on to have a good career. So did a teenager in the audience, Robert Zimmerman, who became known a few years later as Bob Dylan.
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The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1973:
The number one album today in 1979 was the Blues Brothers’ “Briefcase Full of Blues”:
Birthdays begin with one of Dion’s Belmonts, Angelo D’Aleo:
Dennis Edwards of the Temptations:
Eric Haydock played bass for the Hollies:
Dave Davies of the Kinks:
Two-hit wonder Melanie Safka:
Tony Butler played bass for Big Country:
Lol Tolhurst played keyboards for the Cure:
Who is Richie Kotzen? You know him as Mr. Big, whose career really wasn’t, having one hit:
Cain and Abel and the Tower of Babel: These are far from the most inspiring of biblical images. And so they are the ones that jump out at you upon reading Pope Francis’s recent message on “fake news” and our communications today. As I quickly checked Twitter before setting down to write this column, I saw someone express a wish that an ideological opponent would get hit by a bus, simply for having a different point of view. In such a climate, when we are losing our grasp on the reality of our common humanity, the pope’s message seemed like an urgent plea from a wise pastor.
Pope Francis talked about why it can be difficult to unmask and eliminate fake news:
Many people interact in homogeneous digital environments impervious to differing perspectives and opinions. Disinformation thus thrives on the absence of healthy confrontation with other sources of information that could effectively challenge prejudices and generate constructive dialogue; instead, it risks turning people into unwilling accomplices in spreading biased and baseless ideas. The tragedy of disinformation is that it discredits others, presenting them as enemies, to the point of demonizing them and fomenting conflict. Fake news is a sign of intolerant and hypersensitive attitudes, and leads only to the spread of arrogance and hatred. That is the end result of untruth.
Intolerant and hypersensitive much these days? Aren’t we seeing such states of mind everywhere in people’s frequent inability to read not just beyond a headline but even past a word or a name? (And honestly, one name in particular, of a man who happens to currently occupy the White House — and you don’t even have to take a stand on him to acknowledge that we might have an unhealthy attachment to him, whether you might find yourself gawking at, denouncing, defending, or celebrating him.)
I’ve seen intolerance for years online, but in the fairly recent past, it often took the form of an email from someone who disagreed with you who hoped that you and people you loved would die long, agonizing deaths (thinking of my own inbox over the years). Oftentimes, though, I’d find myself emailing back with a heartfelt word or with sorrow that I might have said anything to elicit so much painful anger.
Usually I received a response of embarrassment — the emailer was venting and never thought anyone would actually read his message. What a relief for humanity that a simple opinion column did not truly bring out venomous wrath in another. And yet, now, with the speed of many modes of social communications and their overwhelmingly ubiquitous nature, it becomes increasingly difficult to have the kind of actual human (albeit cyber) encounter we once had over email.Pope Francis diagnosed the problem well when he wrote: “Constant contamination by deceptive language can end up darkening our interior life.” He quoted The Brothers Karamazov as “illuminating”:
People who lie to themselves and listen to their own lie come to such a pass that they cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others. And having no respect, they cease to love, and in order to occupy and distract themselves without love they give way to passions and to coarse pleasures, and sink to bestiality in their vices, all from continual lying to others and to themselves.
He ultimately offered a new prayer, inspired by Saint Francis’s prayer for peace, encouraging a “journalism of peace,” including:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace.
Help us to recognize the evil latent in a communication that does not build communion. . . .
Where there is shouting, let us practice listening; where there is confusion, let us inspire harmony; where there is ambiguity, let us bring clarity; where there is exclusion, let us offer solidarity; where there is sensationalism, let us use sobriety; where there is superficiality, let us raise real questions; where there is prejudice, let us awaken trust; where there is hostility, let us bring respect; where there is falsehood, let us bring truth.This prayer needn’t be only for those employed as journalists or writers. It could be well prayed and practiced by any one of us with all varieties of platforms and opportunities for communication. This could be an international television network, on social media, or at your office water cooler or kitchen table. Pope Francis writes that “the effectiveness of fake news is primarily due to its ability to mimic real news, to seem plausible.” Similarly, some of the poisonous social-media exchanges only mimic real human communication. Let’s raise the bar — in person and online.
First, to continue a decades-long tradition: It’s a great day for groundhogs. Unless they see their shadow and predict six more weeks of winter, in which case they should be turned into ground groundhog.
Today in 1959, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper all appeared at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
That would be their final concert appearance because of what happened after the concert.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 