I’D like to set Osama bin Laden straight.
The terrorist bastard stuck his head out of his cave long enough recently to brag that the attack on the World Trade Center had done enormous economic damage to the U.S.
“More than $1 trillion in losses resulted from these successful and blessed attacks, and may God bless these martyrs and welcome them to paradise,” he gloats on a videotape of unknown origin that was released last week.
“Losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent, and they said this number was a record since the market opened,” bin Laden says on tape.
I guess they don’t deliver newspapers in Tora Bora or whatever hole bin Laden’s now cowering in. But here are some facts.
– While the stock market did temporarily drop to a three-year low after the Sept. 11 attack, the Dow had recovered all and more of its losses by December when the index was back over 10,000.
Henry Blodgett and the other Internet crazies did more damage than that.
– While bin Laden was living in his comfy subterranean passage, over 6 million families bought brand new homes in this country. More than 446,000 of those homes were purchased in the Northeast, where I assume bin Laden thinks he caused the most trouble.
Those numbers weren’t much different than the months before the attack.
– While bin Laden was tooling around the Afghan mountains on his donkey, Americans spent $448 billion on new cars, a big jump from before the attacks. And we spent over $48 billion on furniture, over $45 billion on electronic equipment, $85.2 billion on clothing and $45 billion on sporting goods.
– And while Osama and the boys were grilling mountain kill over an open pit, Americans were spending $162 billion on food and drinks in restaurants.
– Thousands of people from dozens of countries lost their lives in the Trade Center. Those are the martyrs of Sept. 11.
Admittedly, there was a lot of physical damage to lower Manhattan. But from a purely economic point of view, bin Laden’s terrorist attack didn’t have much of an effect.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that the cost of all those bombs we’re tossing Osama’s way, along with the rebuilding in the U.S., is actually helping the U.S. economy recover from a recession that began before we even knew his name.
If bin Laden was aiming at the American way of life, he missed.
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It happened again.
The stock market almost always does poorly the week after options expire. Yesterday’s 120-point loss in the Dow was no exception.
Some good economic numbers, including a big rise in industrial production, helped the market last week. But the main reason that stocks had a big gain of 207 points last Tuesday was the expiration of stock options and stock index options.
Some bad corporate forecasts yesterday helped send the market down. But more importantly, there was no artificial support from traders now that expiration week has passed.
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Wall Street’s pie-in-the-sky era is coming to an end. The beleaguered stock research community is getting more realistic.
So far 1,006 companies have released public statements on how they think they did in the first quarter. The numbers: 315 have indicated that earnings would be better than expected; 490 worse than expected and the rest right in line with forecasts.
That’s a ratio of 1.6 negative warnings for every 1 positive forecast. At this time last year the ratio was running about four-to-one for negative surprises over positives.
The better 1.6-to-1 ratio is partly due to improvements in the economy, which are making corporate profits stronger.
But Thomson Financial Corp., which keeps the numbers, says it is mostly due to the fact that analysts’ expectations have become more realistic and companies are able to disappoint them even with bad results.
“Corporate America and analysts reeled in their overly optimistic forecasts that built up in the 1990s,” says Joseph Kalinowski, chief researcher for Thomson.
Overall, profits are expected to be down 10.7 percent in the first quarter.
* Please send e-mail to: jcrudele@nypost.com