Have you noticed? Everything’s bad these days. On February 25, 2015, the Washington Post wonkblog posted a piece titled “Why rising wages might be bad news.” Last week, on September 1st, after another strong month of car and truck sales, the Wall Street Journal published a story “The Bad News in Strong Car Sales.” Back in January 2014, when the dollar was weak, Zerohedge.com published a piece titled “The Slow (But Inevitable) Demise Of The Dollar.” Buy gold! Now that the dollar is strong, the US is in a deadly currency war. On July 28, 2015, cnn.compublished a piece titled “Watch Out: Strong U.S. dollar could trigger currency crisis.” Sell everything! Television is even worse, but combing through hours of tape to find those nuggets of really bad analysis, we already know are there every day, seems like a waste of time. We are tempted to argue that bad news sells, so the bigger the explosion, the more flame or flying metal a story has, the more viewers tune in. But, it goes deeper than that. First off, our political leadership – on both sides of the aisle – use economic fear in an attempt to win votes. The Right argues that as long as Barack Obama is president, nothing good can happen. Ask them about the stock market and they say it’s just a sugar high caused by the Fed. Ask them... More