Best Predictor of Wall Street Behavior?

I must point out that this is not a factual article and it is all entirely my unsupported opinion and quite possibly the product of media overload.

Back in maybe October of 2007, I started paying a bit more attention to CNBC, the financial cable channel, after Maria Bartiromo pointed out that there was an immense and growing backlog -- I think she used the phrase "overhang" -- in new home construction, and that given that the market was starting to slow down, there would doubtless be a slowdown in the homebuilding industry. That caused me to write this genuinely epic UseNet post. Talk about hitting the nail on the head, in retrospect...

Well, anyway, all of this caused me to start paying more attention to CNBC.

Finally, the fit really hit the shan, so to speak, and with nothing better to do, I was fairly well glued to the screen on CNBC.

And who, poor thing, was stuck at the heart of it all, giving the play by play as the wheels came off of the economy and the train left the tracks to hurtle along mile after endless mile, becoming society's careening wreckage?

Erin Burnett, that's who.

Ms Burnett is definitely very smart and very well informed and thinks on her feet very quickly indeed, a valuable set of talents and skills given the caliber of her colleagues and the guests on the channel. Also, she's got one of those old-school American faces that can carry off almost any "look" from fresh-faced girl-next-door to femme-fatale at the Ambassador's Ball. And as she found herself the unsuspecting anchor of a previously-underwatched cable network daytime show that had suddenly become cable's equivalent of "must see teevee" with an unprecedented market share, Ms Burnett never failed to give top-notch reporting, though at times she seemed to have something of the air about her of a postgrad who has just done three consecutive all-nighters and is still "ace-ing" the verbal dissertation, in a state somewhat balancing godlike knowledge and somnambulism, all while forcing a semblance of "pert" and "chipper" when all she wants is 24 hours of uninterrupted sleep. I rather suspect she was suddenly getting paid lots of overtime and bonuses.

Yet through all of this, though she managed to maintain her personal composure and professionalism, her wardrobe was to some degree migrating all over the map. Even while Sarah Palin was catching a raft of scrap from the media over her wardrobe shopping sprees, Ms Burnett evidently would be doing her homework all night leading up to the opening bell and the "Squawk on the Street" segments, and right before showtime someone would pop in and drop a wardrobe in her lap and drag her off to the makeup artist. Evidently, on some days, she let the network dress her and on other days she said "I'm busy dammit" and showed up with fairly workaday coif and clothes, and some days she showed up looking like the front cover of Vogue.

Some days, of course, the people in makeup were in a bit of a hurry as showtime approached, and some days Ms Burnett's hair didn't feel much like cooperating. On some days, it seemed fairly calm, and on some days, it was clearly in open revolt and determined to cause trouble... much like the markets.

I wish I had kept records. Maybe someone else did. But belatedly, after the fact, it seems to me that on those days when Ms Burnett's hair and wardrobe were most "metrosexual" (can women be metrosexual?), those were the days when the DJIA ran screaming off of a cliff. On those days when Ms Burnett's hair was rebelling against constraints of any form or type, those were the days when the market went screaming aloft. Ms Burnett's hairstyle was all over the place, and couldn't seem to settle into any particular mode or direction (and sometimes her hair itself exhibited the same behavior as the hairstyle), and as much as her hairstyle was all over the place, so was the market.

SO, I can't research this, but maybe some videophiles or youtubers out there can do the research and publish the data, to either support or contradict my thesis, or leave it as an untestable or an undecided. And this is my thesis: in these uncertain times, the best predictor of the the Wall Street markets' behavior is Erin Burnett's hair.

And now that this has been pointed out, how must she feel to be the bearer of such power?