Nick Hodge,
Publisher
May 26, 2026
Andrew Ross Sorkin has a book to promote.
It has the wordy title: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation.
Like your local news, which will try to scare you with hantavirus, ebola, or anything else that bleeds and leads, Mr. Sorkin has figured out that bad news sells.
People can’t help but rubberneck at car crashes.
Same goes for the stock market.
(Side story: In my 20 years as a financial publisher, I have conducted many A/B split tests on email subject lines. “Bad News” beats “Good News” every single time.)
This is because of our evolutionary lizard brain. It is programmed to care more about danger than lack of danger. A lion will kill you, an antelope won’t. So we innately care more about the former than the latter.
Which is why market participants pay attention to crash calls and 1929 is a best-seller.
It’s also why Sorkin gets to go on 60 Minutes and speculate about the next stock market shark attack, which he did over Memorial Day weekend.
The episode was titled: “Booms, Busts and Bubbles.”
But it was alliterative bullcrap.
It concluded thusly, with Sorkin saying: “We will have a crash. I just can’t tell you when. And I can’t tell you how deep.”
Thanks for the specifics, Nostradamus.
That’s like me saying it’s going to rain, but I can’t tell you when, and calling myself a meteorologist.
I’m going to get a flat tire someday. I just can’t tell you when. But I’m not going to stop driving in the interim.
He’s got books to sell. I get it.
Calling for a crash sells a lot more than having some nuance.
But markets don’t pay royalties to bestselling authors. They pay investors who follow price, liquidity, and trend.
Right now, we're at all-time market highs.
If you let false fear prophecies shake you out, then you have missed out on some extraordinary gains.
Those highs come with fear absolutely fading from the market. The VIX is getting comfortable at multi-month lows, putting the panic of the Iran War in the rear-view.
Is it bizarre that markets are soaring while bombs and consumer confidence are falling?
Emphatically yes. But that doesn’t mean the gains aren’t real or that a crash is imminent.
We do have higher inflation to deal with and the newly anointed Fed chair will have his work cut out for him. The market is now marginally pricing a hike as the Fed’s next move — but not until January 2027. For the next five meetings, the highest-probability outcome is still no change from the current 3.50%–3.75% range.
We will get a slowdown in growth as we approach back to school. And that will likely come with some softness in the market as well.
But that is normal market stuff and certainly not worthy of shouting fire in the theater just to sell some books.
We are long — and profiting from — commodities and infrastructure and AI and robots.
I’ll get out my umbrella when it starts raining.
For now, enjoy the sunshine.'
Call it like you see it,
Nick Hodge
Publisher, Bizarro World