Dead Cat Bounce - 2 August 2002

My secretary - who is wise in many things, but especially knowledgeable about the gyrating life of the stock market - came in the other day to see her boss exulting, I think is the word, over the stock market giving a life-like imitation of a missile taking off from Cape Canaveral.

"Four hundred and forty points," I crooned.

She took a swig of her bottled water and said snappily: "Dead cat bounce."

Well, a cynical remark to a simpleton like me who has believed since the only lecture I ever heard from John Maynard Keynes that the stock market has no life of its own.

I gather that, on the contrary, it lives by blood transfusions of public confidence. Therefore every time the public has a burst of confidence the altitude of the market is the immediate reflection of it.

I've believed this religiously since the dark days of the early 30s in Cambridge when the most widespread rumour was that Professor Keynes, who was in charge of the portfolio of King's College, was maintaining the college in rude financial health in the depth of the Depression.

Well I ought to say that last Wednesday, on that memorable running of the bulls, my secretary closed the financial discussion by saying: "If this goes on for 10 days I'll believe it."

Well I've been counting and on the seventh morning, after breakfast, I turned on my usual Atlanta fountain of news and there was the president, wearing a Kent collar and a neatly knotted gold tie, telling us with that winning smile of his that the indices of the economy all revealed growth, not quite as much as we might wish but positive growth.

While the president was giving us this rousing news over his shoulder, on the mean channel that was telecasting him, there were the numbers: the industrial average slumping down 70, 75, 80 points, even as he spoke, the hi-tech stuff, to which during the 80s and 90s we entrusted all our fortunes, even unto half our kingdom, they never do seem ready to perk up.

Within an hour of the president's talk both graphs were trying to clamber back up. At which point a distinguished economist came on to say he was sorry that the economy was weakening but we were just about to go into a double-dip recession.

So on Thursday morning anyway we had a choice of interpretations - a double-dip recession or a dead cat bounce. Sounds like one of the jazz nonsense songs of the 1930s.

Shall we move on?

The most complex, magical and incredible news story of last week or any week anyone could remember in the state of Pennsylvania, was, you'd have guessed, the never-hoped-for rescue of nine miners after 80 resigned hours in the dark and the waters rising to their chins.

They were 24 storeys below ground.

Last Wednesday night the nine men were working away when they were inundated by a torrent of water that came at them from an abandoned mine which they'd known and they'd thought to be a long way off.

The mine the men were working on is practically the width of a landscape and the first bad news we heard was that as soon as the gushing and rumbling boom of the accident happened, up on the surface engineers were grabbing maps and desperately calculating where, over one square mile, the men could possibly be.

Where, therefore, to sink an air pipe which - if it hit the right spot after boring through 240 feet - might conceivably keep some of them breathing.

The engineers did frantic sums and measurements and made guesses. And in this very chapel-going town it was later decided that nothing but the grace of God made their guess exactly correct.

So this five-inch steel tube eventually pierced through the low roof above the men, already tied together so they would die not singly but as a team, and already scribbling farewell notes.

On Thursday the drill was sunk into a 30-inch hole and the men huddled together in the ever slowly rising water began to hear very far off the start of the drilling sound.

And then on Friday they heard it no more. The drill broke in the shaft.

It took 12 hours to replace it with a 26-inch bit. It got down just over 200 feet - 40 to go - when it stopped on a broken pipe.

So all through Friday night and into Saturday night the miners stood and sagged together and had the water rising on their chests.

At twenty past 10 on Saturday night the drill broke through the mine chamber's ceiling and a phone line was lowered.

At 1 am on Sunday the first miner floated up in the rapidly-manufactured shell of a lift.

One hour and 45 minutes later all nine were up and safe and dumb with gratitude.

A poster was pasted up on the window of the local cafeteria. Scrawled alongside an American flag were the words: "Thank you God, nine for nine."

Talking of memorable images none has monopolised the airspace of any of the hundred-odd channels more impressively this week than daily sessions of the Senate's foreign relations committee, which is the most influential of all the subsidiary bodies of Congress when it comes to debating questions of American foreign policy.

It's not simply a public debate between the law makers, the committee has the power to call anyone in the United States, from secretaries of state, ex-presidents, business titans, truck drivers, anyone who possesses an expertise in any way related to the theme under discussion.

The present hearings were provoked by one or two former United Nations inspectors who'd been thwarted for years by Saddam Hussein.

But the need to hold public hearings was made pressing by the wholly lamentable fact that in the past six months or so somebody in the Pentagon, or other relevant department, leaked the outline of the administration's contingency plans about Iraq.

Now, every nation since the invention of the bow and arrow has devised a current policy in response to a known threat and all the most alert nations have always dared to imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to it and then work out a secret, usually horrendous, plan to counter it.

Until very recently no nation allowed the press, the media, to get a glance at its hair-raising contingency plans.

But it's happened twice just lately, most notoriously over the possible threat to world peace - to America's security anyway - of Saddam Hussein.

Within a day of the leak Secretary Rumsfeld was having to speculate to the media that any invasion of Iraq would require American and allied ground forces of a quarter of a million men.

Then the question popped: which allies? Beginning with Saudi Arabia and going all the way across Europe there are no promised allies except possibly the United Kingdom.

Since then, since much talk about wild worst possible scenarios sketched out by hawks and doves, it has become essential to bring the whole thing out in public hearings.

And after three days only it has done some good in revealing the Iraq crisis as a tremendous and complex and urgent theme with much to be said on three or four sides.

Obviously we shall go into it once the hearings are over. In the meantime I'm reminded of a conversation decades ago with the second Secretary General of the United Nations - Dag Hammarskjold.

He was, at first, absolutely against holding press conferences and then, of course, he had to give in.

He also opposed, without success, the reporting of committee meetings on the international issues of the day.

President Woodrow Wilson, he said, was dead wrong in promising in the Treaty of Versailles, "open agreements openly arrived at".

The conduct of diplomacy could only be successful if there were open agreements secretly arrived at, otherwise, moaned Hammarskjold, diplomacy is dead and you open the handling of events to a babble of voices.

Well so it has been.

Of all the images that have appeared on our screens during the past week there's no contest in my mind in favour of the one that moved a watching audience of many millions whether or not they shared or opposed or were indifferent to the beliefs and the mission of the main presence which was that of Pope John Paul II in Toronto.

First his arrival there, his infinitely laboured stepping down from the plane.

The slow ride through the city. The bowed figure straining his bent arm to give a child-like wave.

The head so helplessly bent over, the face no longer having the muscle to make a smile.

The flight and the descent from the plane was so much for this greatly ailing body that he had to rest alone for three days.

And then to appear in a vast airport before a quarter million young faces that shrunk on the horizon to a huge field of confetti.

It was to them that he made what we've been told was the supreme effort of his visit - his head shook twice, the muscles of his face braced and the voice was suddenly firm.

"The harm done by some priests to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame, but think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests whose only wish is to serve and do good."

Before the sentence was over a huge, tidal wave of relief flooded the airport and the camera panned across an ocean of young smiling faces - all, as an old priest put it, triumphantly strengthened in their faith by the one human being who can do it.

Perhaps the sight of a cardinal and a bishop or two on their way to jail might strengthen it even more.

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