New York City's 21 Club, a famed Midtown eatery, was expecting a group of 90 Wall Street types from Salomon Brothers, a famed investment house, for lunch last Monday. Only 40 showed. "And they were grim," recalls Swapan Rozario, who works 21's banquet room. Downtown, the stock market was having Solly and all the other big swinging brokerage houses for lunch, plunging a record 554 points in one nauseating session. The next day, Turnaround Tuesday, Salomon's traders, and everyone else, were too busy making money to have lunch, as the Dow reared up to gain back 337 points of that loss.
The mesmerizing pair of panics--the headlong retreat on Monday followed by a buying frenzy the next day--is causing policymakers, corporations and investors to make an abrupt re-evaluation of the economy and the stock market in the face of an unexpected jolt from the Far East. If the market is the sum of all investors' knowledge at any given moment, as many theorists argue, then what on earth is this barking dog trying to tell us?
For one thing, it says the notion that small investors, inexperienced in down markets, would bolt at the first sign of trouble is all wrong. It was the pros who fled on Monday: if these guys had been on the Titanic, they would have been fighting the children for lifeboats. The pros were saved by the little guys on Tuesday. Most folks did nothing; others couldn't wait to "buy the dips," just as they had been counseled to do so often. "I have been through this a few times," says Kooshy Afshar, the owner of a small printing company in Beverly Hills, Calif. "When the market goes down, I sit tight. I look at the market as a long-term investment."
But beyond that obvious message, is there a deeper meaning? It seems farfetched that such a panic could occur for no good reason and without consequence. We're way beyond normal price volatility here. Throughout history, daily Dow moves of 1% or 2% up or down have been relatively common. But Monday's 7% decline was the 12th worst ever; Tuesday's 4.7% gain, the best in a decade. Was the market right on Monday or on Tuesday?
We have been cruising along under the fuzzy notion that the '90s are different, that an economy with seemingly rock-solid fundamentals could withstand the buffeting of currency crises in countries half a world away. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who likes this kind of excitement about as much as he does a rash, carefully reinforced his long-held belief that the Nirvana-like state of low unemployment and steady growth that correlates with his tenure can be sustained by riding herd on inflation. Said he: "Our economy has enjoyed a lengthy period of good economic growth, linked, not coincidentally, to damped inflation. The Federal Reserve is dedicated to contributing as best it can to prolonging this performance." And right on cue, data released Friday showed that inflation slowed dramatically this summer.
The consensus on Wall Street and in Washington, where, in both places, it is undeniably lucrative to be bullish, is that Monday was the mistake; Tuesday set things right. The believers in this sort of "new economy" school see the sell-off as an overreaction to an economic slowdown in Asia, a development that heralds only a modest drag on the U.S. economy and the earnings of U.S. companies.
Why? Only 4% of America's exports land in the more problematic Asian nations--Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines--not nearly enough for troubles there to seriously cut into the earnings of U.S. companies, at least not directly. In fact, the Asian problems might not have even registered with American investors if not for the fact that stock prices in the U.S. are so high that they have become hypersensitive to any and all adverse news. "It doesn't take much to derail a market that has gone to the moon," says Stephen Roach, chief global economist for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
In Wall Street parlance, Monday's sharp decline was "a market event," meaning that it had little to do with the real economy and everything to do with the sheer unsustainable height of stock prices. That view makes the decline easy to swallow and lends credibility to the wisdom of staying happy and staying in stocks or, as the little guy did Tuesday, buying even more. "There is no reason to think the U.S. stock market is going to go into a bear market," says economist Allen Sinai at Primark Decision Economics. "The U.S. economy is not going to be knocked down by the crisis in Asia."
Soothing proclamations like that one came quickly and from many quarters, reverberating throughout brokerage firms, mutual-fund companies, barbershops and shopping malls all week. Mighty IBM announced that its shares were so attractive, it would spend as much as $3.5 billion buying them back. From her perch as co-chair of the investment-policy committee at venerable Goldman Sachs, Abby Joseph Cohen, the most consistently bullish--and correct--market forecaster of the 1990s, declared the sell-off a buying opportunity and promptly raised from 60% to 65% her portfolio's allocation to stocks.
No gesture seemed too small with a full-blown panic possibly still ahead. At half time of Monday Night Football, the NASDAQ stock market, a sponsor, stated its closing value as it usually does, but failed to mention, as it usually does, the index's change for the day. In this case, it was down a record 116 points, or 7%.
Perhaps the most soothing of all, though, were the carefully chosen words of Greenspan. In his inimitable style, the Fed chief called the swift market decline "a salutary event" that might be just what the economy needs to keep from overheating and allow the '90s expansion to continue for years.
Like a snake charmer, Greenspan talked the market into a catatonic state--or was it that traders were merely exhausted? Prices remained somewhat stable the rest of the week, and by Friday the Dow stood 9.9% below its all-time high and few investors seemed much worse for the wear. There were some casualties, among them speculator George Soros, whose company lost $2 billion on Monday. Several Fed presidents joined Greenspan in talking up the economy. "The basics of the U.S. economy are strong," said Cathy Minehan, president of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. "I see no reason why that should change." Thomas Melzer, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, said the economy was doing "exceptionally well."
