Investors had plenty to worry about on Friday, with oil quotes sharply on the rise and rumors circulating that North Korea would test a nuclear weapon over the weekend. These and other factors, including the usual earnings worries, were said to have spooked the markets late in the day, causing the Dow Industrials to close down 61 points. But if bulls were unnerved by the news, bears appeared to be just as nervous that the weekend might pass without a nuclear detonation. Thus, in the final 20 minutes of the session, did they chase stocks as though Monday morning might find us all inundated by bliss. The flurry of buying launched the Dow into a 90-point spike from intraday lows that had been recorded only moments earlier.

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Who can say what might have happened if there had been another hour in the day? Perhaps bulls and bears alike would have realized that the worst-case scenario is not a nuclear test in North Korea, but a nuclear test in some sovereign neighbor’s air space. Remember, this is a country that once bragged that it could hit L.A. with an ICBM. And it is run, not by a garden variety dictator but by a Cognac-guzzling Michael Jackson fan who trails only Mao and Stalin in the number of fellow countrymen he has starved to death. Kim Jong Il is also known as a ruthlessly efficient manager of his country‘s famously scarce resources, so why would he waste even a grapefruit-sized quantity of the scarcest material of all, weapons grade plutonium, just to make something go “bang”! Better to stretch those military dollars by killing two birds with one stone. Japan, for instance. My guess is that we could have bought off Kim years ago by sending him Brooke Shields. Too late now, though.