I don’t know if it is “Wall Street,” the media, someone else or all of the above but the market often confronts scary events that cause people to get very worried and then these scary events end up being nothing, or close to it.

Going in, these are all “different” but they never are. In the summer of 2002 there was genuine panic because CEO were going to have to certify their earnings. Woooo, that was going to be a bad one. It really turned out to be more of a bottom than a top.

Just recently we had the options expensing thing. This was going to wreak havoc with earnings, hmmmm not so much. I wrote about that one in December 2004, about six months before it was due to start. That one seemed to have zero impact.

I am not sure how many people are paying attention to the commercial paper issue or the mortgage reset issue but neither will matter anywhere near as much as some people fear.

There will be impact here and there no doubt but my hunch is that neither will derail the markets. Invariably there will be a dissenting comment on this but we have seen this movie over and over. The terror caused by the earnings certification was so huge and it was a non event.

The thing that happens with these is that we start hearing about them months ahead of time and so the market prices it in, the surprise factor disappears; who doesn’t know there are a ton of mortgage resets coming?

While I am not a 100% efficient market guy these sorts of things tend to have far less bite than bark.

Last 5 posts by Roger Nusbaum

• The Big Picture for the Week of November 15, 2009 - November 14th, 2009
• Process Drilldown - October 23rd, 2009
• Sunday Morning Coffee 10-18-09 - October 18th, 2009
• A Little Followup From This Morning - October 8th, 2009
• Wednesday Roundup - October 7th, 2009