No News is Good News
NEW YORK: The Dow tacked on 115 points to a two-week surge Tuesday, pushing past 8300 during trading and closing just shy of the milestone at 8295.61. Another record should fall Wednesday. "When the Street wants to buy, the Street wants to buy," says FORTUNE columnist Nelson Schwartz. "People are afraid of getting left behind--it's emotional." Why the stampede? There's no bad news to poop the party.
"The continued quiet in Asia is really the key," says Schwartz. Tech bellwethers like Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco, supposedly the primary victims of sluggish overseas markets, have been rising steadily of late. And at home, potential flare-ups like the Lewinsky scandal ("Wall Street loves stability," Schwartz says) have had no effect on Bill Clinton's approval ratings--except to push them higher. And a military strike on Iraq looks weeks away. "Wall Street is emotional," Schwartz says. All the big players are buying, and when the mood is this good, only a real catastrophe is capable of spoiling it.
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