Spring has sprung at long last. It's been a long, cold winter, and the teeny weeny crocuses (croci?) now popping up their little blue heads in the park are very welcome indeed. So is all the good news that's apparently bursting forth along with them.
First, the Journal informs us this morning that hedge funds are bouncing back with "return-hungry investors pumping up the industry to a size not seen since before the financial crisis laid it low."
I don't know about you, but I'm liking this news a lot. It means that rich people are once again seizing control of the market and plunging back head first into rampant speculation -- taking bigger chances with their money and letting their greed do the talking and the walking. When greed outpaces fear, we know that we're on the brink of another bubble. May the new bubble last as long as the old one! And may we have the presence of mind to guess a little bit earlier when it will burst! Until then? It's gonna be fun again in Wall Street for a while. And fun is good.
Also just as encouraging is the news that nuclear power is safe again. I work out in a gym in midtown Manhattan, when I am in Manhattan and feeling as fat as Donald Trump's ostensible wallet. (Did you know he's VERY, VERY rich? This qualifies him to be the Republican nominee for p resident more than Mitt Romney, or so he told the Tea Party convention yesterday.) Most of the time, I get to the gym around noon. Like everyplace else in America, there is a TV bolted to the ceiling in the locker room. Gotta have TV on all the time. Gotta have electronic impulses pumped into our brains, all... the... time. In airports, it's Headline News. In the gym, for some reason, it's cable finance. The lunchtime show. Blah blah blah yamma yamma yamma har de har har ding ding ding. Cable finance.
You can't escape the voice of a television set, of course. You can try. But you will fail. It seeps in. And lately, it seems to me that every couple of days here comes some guy in a suit and a smile talking about how the nuclear power industry is going to be just fine here in the U.S. because everything is just fine with our nuclear plants and nothing like the Japan thing could possibly happen here.
We're better prepared, it seems. We have stopgaps and safeguards and investors are once again sniffing around the edges of the nuclear biz, and that's another thing that's back to normal and a-OK. I saw it on TV. The first time I saw it, I thought "oh, come on." The next time I saw it, I thought, "Hey, these lobbyists for nuclear power are out in frickin' droves." The most recent time I saw it I said, "Thank goodness we have all those safeguards and stopgaps." I guess the next time I see it I'll think, "I should really bulk up on nuclear stocks."
And why not, really. It's spring. Optimism rules.