Jeez O Peet, people

Get a grip. “Wall Street Tanks!” cries FoxNews. “Suffers historic losses, 500 points down!”
Yeah, OK. That was earlier today. So right now the Dow is down 369.64 at 12,262.62…which is something like just under three percent, which is half a percent better than it was five minutes ago when I first looked at the numbers and started this post.
Whoopdeefuckingdoo.
Perspective is everything.
UPDATE: Here’s the close: DJIA 12,216.24 -416.02 -3.29%
Now, was that so bad, people? Remember “Black Monday”, October 18, 1987? The Dow shed 508 points…but that was 22.6% of its value back then. Yet Fox is still calling it a “major hit”, “got slammed”, and other interesting ways of making it sound awful, like “worst day since 9/11” — which it is in terms of points, but not in terms of percentage of value lost.
And this page is idiotic, because instead of Black Monday being the number one hit out of the ten they’ve printed, it’s #5 because the page is ranking them by points instead of percentages. Today is ranked #7 by Fox, but ought to be #10 by percentage. With all due respect to Fox News, the points are meaningless — it’s the percentage of value lost that tells you how deep the correction is.
Perspective. It’s a good word to remember.