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03/07/2005: "What is the sound of one shoe dropping?"

Last Thursday the price of oil inched above $55 dollar a barrel, which is at least $15 barrel more than it was a year ago. On Friday, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently the price of of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five dollars a barrel in the span of ten days.

On Friday evening, CNN reported that the Dow shot up over one hundred points because of favorable employment numbers issued by the government and also because there were no signs of inflation in government-reported price data. The Dow stands poised to break 11,000. Today, encouraged by the boyancy of the Dow, NASDAQ got within 60 percent of its all time high.

OPEC meets in Iran in less than two weeks and is expected to cut production, as the nation stares into the annual cycle of gasoline prices hikes come Memorial Day.

Stock markets are generally understood to behave on the basis of a consensus among traders about future prospects. Apparently stock traders in America think there is no connection between the price of oil shooting up ten percent in little more than a week, and the price of things that depend on oil for their manufacture or distribution -- which is to say, virtually everything.

As a nation, we are, quite literally, waiting for the other shoe to drop.