These days, my home life is filled with images of trains. Most days, there’s Thomas the Tank Engine, of whom my two year old daughter is a big fan, wending his cheery way across my television.
Recently, she’s adopted another favorite train: the Polar Express. For those without young’uns, that’s another train-themed story and a blockbuster Christmas film in kidworld a few years back.
Big, puffy, steaming, chuffing trains seem to be an enternal delight to the world’s children, decades after they’ve ceased to run everywhere except a few ex-colonial backwaters.
I tend to only sporadically notice what’s going on on the screen, as I try to keep abreast of the toddler chaos erupting all around me. But sometimes my daughter becomes rapt by some event on the screen, and often this is a train crash of some sort, and the living room becomes quiet for the moment as chaos reigns on-screen. It’s as if there’s some limit to the amount of chaos permitted in our household, and the more there is on the screen the less my daughter is allowed to perpetrate.
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I think I can take the credit or blame for her interest in train wrecks because I subjected her to thousands of hours of train wreck watching last autumn, during the infamous Market Meltdown of 2008. I always had the TV tuned to Bloomberg business news, and exactly a year ago the business news ceased being the boring discussion of quarterly earnings and minor moves in bond rates and became the most spectacular venue in which to watch the downbound train of the world economy become a crumpled pile of smoking metal, bent and twisted at the bottom of a canyon.
A horrible sight, as commodity prices plunged along with the stock markets and everyone’s unpriced crops in the bin became daily less valuable, but it’s hard not to watch a train wreck. A perverse fascination in which it’s hard to tear away your eyes, move, do anything.
The 2008 market meltdown and crisis, which carried on until the first week of March 2009, now seems far behind us.
Business news is back to parsing stats on inventories, analyzing small differences in unemployment predictions, poring over quarterly earning matches and misses, discussing the nature of the “recovery.”
It’s no doubt cheerier fare to watch, but less exciting. When everything’s going OK or better – and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has now retraced 50 percent of its loss, making for better looking portfolios for investors and big fat bonus cheques for unchastened Wall Street bankers – it’s hard to get too excited about VIX, the BDI, LIBOR or any of the other acronyms that the market inhales and exhales like oxygen. At this time last year, the slump of the BDI suddenly made millions of people around the world aware of the Baltic Dry Index, which is a measure many farmers may have heard about because it affects bottom line returns for grain exports but which to the average civilian was unknown.
By last winter, legions of people were familiar with the volatility indicator known as VIX, with the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, with the BDI. How much of that knowledge will go into people’s long term memory banks? My guess is: Not much. Now that the crisis is (at least temporarily) replaced with a feeling of relief, of ‘Don’t worry, be happy,’ people will likely move the VIX, LIBOR and BDI over into the trash bin. They’ll hear the terms a couple of times a year, when scribblers like me write stories about them, but it’s unlikely they’ll sink too deeply into most folks’ consciousness.
That’s probably a good thing, because it’s anything but normal to be obsessed with arcane measures of economic performance. And since the earlier interest was spurred by the awful spectacle of the market wreck, perhaps interest in these things is a sign of shock, of trauma. Perhaps it’s pathological, for all but specialists.
As Thomas’s occasional spills off the tracks show, and the Polar Express’s hair-raising slide across the frozen lake demonstrates, train wrecks are fascinating to watch. But they aren’t fun to live through. And while the business and commodity news right now might be a trifle dull, it’s preferable to the intensely-engaging news of a year before, when the bottom of the chasm was rushing towards us. You never know how long this holiday from woe will last, so perhaps we should enjoy the boredom of a train ride across flat land.
