Now wasn’t that refreshing! The Dow did a nearly 300-point dipsy-doodle yesterday, providing comic relief for millions of investors who might otherwise have spent the day fretting over the oil spill and North Korea’s quasi-declaration of war. Earlier in the day, before NYSE stocks staged an epic recovery from abysmal lows, both of these developing news stories were cited by pundits as reasons why the broad averages had plummeted on the opening bell. How silly of us to think that Wall Street might actually have been concerned about Kim Jong-il’s next move, or about the mounting catastrophe that threatens to destroy the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem and shore-based economy, if not the economy of the entire U.S. Perhaps when globs of tar start washing up in the Hamptons, and the livelihoods of fisherman from Maine to Galveston are threatened, perhaps then stock-market speculators will act for once like they have a stake in the real world.
In the meantime, it’s hard to tell which is more threatening: a nuclear-armed, certified whack-job spoiling for a fight with his neighbor to the south, or an oil gusher that could turn most of America’s coastline hostile to humans and deadly to waterfowl and marine life. We supposed we’d rather take our chances with Kim Jong-Il, since there’s always the remote possibility he’ll wind up like Mussolini and those lovely Ceausescus. But the oil-spill story seems to be getting worse by the hour, and it has the potential to replace “American Idol” as bozo-dom’s number one obsession if British Petroleum’s attempt to plug the leak with a “top kill” fails. Failure was evidently a risk, since the oil may be gushing too hard for the tactic to work, according to some engineers. There were also rumors that the sea bed had collapsed and that trillions of cubic feet of methane could ultimately be released into the atmosphere. If so, investors who survive would surely want to tune to Cramer’s show, since he’ll be the first to come up with a list of publically trade companies positioned to make out like bandits. We can’t think of any such companies ourselves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the end of civilization as we know it will not have investable consequences for the lucky few.
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Oil Spill and N Korea:
The two may be connected. The drilling company is South Korean. Lately, South Korean properties explode in the middle of the ocean….
This should be a good excuse to go after (Sadam)Kim Jong-il…..