Greenspanic
The Los Angeles
Times , USA
Today , and the Wall
Street Journal (in its "Business and Finance" box) lead with the stock
market's biggest plunge in over a year--a story off-leaded by the New York Times and Washington Post. The Nasdaq
index fell 5.6 percent (after gaining 86 percent in 1999) and the Dow fell 3.2
percent (after gaining 25 in '99). Analysts attribute the sell-off to tax
incentives arriving with the new year and to heightened fears of an
interest-rate hike when the Federal Reserve Board meets on Feb. 1. The
NYT and Post lead with President Clinton's announcement that
he will nominate Alan Greenspan for a fourth four-year term as chairman of the
Fed. USAT and the LAT mention Clinton's announcement in their
stock-market leads, while the Journal puts it fourth from the top in
its "Business and Finance" box.
The Journal says that Clinton's announcement "mak[es] official what
markets had been expecting and what politicians from both parties had been
endorsing for months." The Post , however, writes that "some participants in the financial markets had
begun to speculate that Clinton might not reappoint [Greenspan], or that the
administration would try to influence Fed interest-rate policy in exchange for
the reappointment." So, are the market dip and Greenspan's appointment related?
Yes and no: While Wall Street analysts laud Clinton's move, his announcement frees Greenspan from
political pressure to keep rates down. But the papers also blame the sell-off
on tax laws--capital gains earned now are not taxed until April 2001--and an
overvalued technology sector.
USAT 's stock-market story describes the Nasdaq's drop as "breathtaking" but goes on to note
that it was "long overdue" and only the eighth-largest percentage drop in the
index's history. Both USAT and the Post begin a paragraph with the same hackneyed
sentence: "The carnage was widespread." In his NYT column, Paul Krugman asks, "Why was the market so
easily spooked? Presumably because everyone--me included--is even more confused
than usual about what stocks are really worth these days."
The Post fronts an announcement by a Chinese economic planner that
private enterprises should be put on an "equal footing with state-owned
enterprises" for the first time since the 1949 revolution. Although the
Post quotes an expert labeling this a "significant ideological shift,"
a NYT story on the announcement, run inside, focuses instead on China's
inability to grow fast enough to assure jobs for its ballooning
workforce.
USAT fronts and the NYT reefers the development of a new test for pre-cancerous
conditions in the cervix. Unlike a Pap smear, which requires a pelvic exam and
determines if cervical tissue is pre-cancerous, the new procedure tests for the
presence of a pre-cancerous virus and can be self-administered. The HPV
test--for human papilloma virus, which can cause cervical cancer in women over
40--could save many lives in the developing world, where lack of access to Pap
tests leads to nearly 200,000 preventable deaths every year.
The Post and Journal report that Labor Secretary
Alexis Herman backtracked from an Occupational Safety and Health Administration
notice requiring employers to provide proper furniture, lighting, heating, and
ventilation systems to employees working at home. (The Journal credits
the Post --which broke the story
yesterday--in its third paragraph.) "The [ Post ] story raised an
important debate that we need to have about the workplace of the future," said
Herman, who wants to "open a dialogue on the issue" rather than inspect
workers' homes en masse . An op-ed in the Journal argues that
the OSHA guidelines are part of a pattern of Clinton administration electoral
favors to labor unions (because the guidelines discourage telecommuters, who
are hard to organize).
The NYT reports that Seattle will drop all but 40 remaining misdemeanor
charges against WTO protestors. Many of the protestors decried the decision;
they were looking forward to grandstanding during their trials. In the
Journal 's California edition, a retrospective "news article" to
commemorate the state sesquicentennial hearkens back to an era when a different
kind of justice prevailed:
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 8, 1856--With the sheriff unable, or unwilling, to keep
crime in check, the city's 3,000-member Committee of Vigilance stepped into the
breach. Over the past three months, the committee brags, it has hanged four
accused murderers, banished 30 criminals and troublemakers from the region and
run untold numbers of "Sydney Ducks"--as convicts from Australia are known--out
of town.
