Professor Elam

In my post about TXU I linked to an article in Socio Times noting that Chuck Norris has now created an ultra violent karate sport-his life dream he says.  Pete Kendall notes that Norris came to fame at the top of the bull market in the late 1960s, so it makes since he would be coming back now.  Another indication of a darkening mood is the Oscar win by The Departed (perhaps already a good way to describe the counter trend bull market of the last few years).  This is a replay of a series of movies hyping the gangster lifestyle when the GodFather appeared as the market topped in 1972.  And just to make the point complete, Godfather was delivered in a double dose.  Scorsese himself has been making the same kind of movie since then starting with Taxi Driver.  But he had to wait for another climax of markets for the market mood to begin to swing back to his genre.  Interestingly he did not win for his $100 M Aviator. Instead the much darker Million Dollar Baby  won again foretelling a change in mood.  The 1970s also saw the dawn of a new kind of dark movie, the Disaster Flick. The Poseidon Adventure with a fitting description of the times moniker, the World Turned Upside Down, kicked off series of movies about tidal waves, earthquakes, exorcism, and fires (Towering Inferno with the two biggest stars of the day, McQueen and Newman).  The back drop was the Viet Nam war combined with Watergate and an Arab oil Embargo, the world turned upside down indeed.

Now we have a President with similar low ratings, an unpopular war, gangster movies at the Oscars, and gasoline prices edging up again.  Gee looks a lot like 1972 to me.  Note between Jan 1972 and Dec 1974 the Dow dropped from 1051 to 577.  REITS were all the rage then and promptly tanked, they are just showing some weakness now amid the collapse of home builders and sub prime mortgage lenders.  This was repeated with the NASD as it peaked at 5,000 in 2001 and dropped to about 1250.  It has now doubled from that low to rise to about half its 2001 top at 2500.  Look out below, note, this is all a musing about pop culture, not a recommendation on the stock market……but it is fun to track this stuff, eh!