Memo To "our" Congressional "representation": We know that Wall Street is not THE economy:

[patrice]

http://prospect.org/article/wall-street-isnt-economy

But Wall Street is not Main Street. Its fluctuations may demonstrate economic health and distress, but they may not. The stock market can go up for a variety of reasons. It can be reacting to evidence of rapid, broadly shared economic growth -- or the prospect of such growth -- and in those cases, it should elicit a cheer from us all. But it also can be reacting to higher corporate profits that come not from increased productivity or growth but directly out of wages, benefits, higher prices or a variety of cost-saving, corner-cutting measures that don't make the median American's life any better.

Sometimes, the market is just reacting to shortsighted business practices that supercharge earnings, but only temporarily -- as in the case of the housing boom. Or it can go up because of simple irrational exuberance that is reversed with the next morning's trading -- or the next year's crash. The market's fluctuations may not say much about the economy, they may not be as simplistically positive or negative as they seem at first glance, and they may not signal durable trends. They must be treated with care.

The media, however, don't have a whole lot of time to treat them with care. In an age of 24-hour financial channels and daily business broadsheets, the allure of an easily comprehensible number that comes out every few seconds and can serve as the subject for further commentary is hugely seductive. Increasingly, the stock tickers serve the same purpose in economic reporting that poll numbers serve for political scribes: They provide constant, reportable data that can be used to draw broad conclusions about the subject as a whole -- but at a cost of accuracy, random fluctuations and significant separation from the issue at hand.