Industry Standards (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I watched an old episode of “The X-Files” the other night. Agent Scully, ostensibly on vacation, stumbles into a small New England town held hostage by a bratty little girl whose mother dares not discipline her because the girl’s vengeful doll Chinga will cause everyone in sight to harm or even kill themselves.

Though it first aired 20 years ago, “Chinga” felt like an allegory for Congressional Republicans in 2018, who dare not conduct any oversight of an increasingly erratic and childlike President Trump because the result would be political suicide, directed by Trump’s vengeful base of true believers.

By the time you read this, there’s no telling what bratty behavior Donald Trump will have engaged in most recently. But a few days ago, he used the most powerful position of trust in the world to punish Amazon investors with a bald-faced lie, apparently because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ other investment, the Washington Post, has engaged in a little too much freedom of the press.

No matter what the Leader of the Free World said on Twitter, e-commerce — led by Amazon — is a rare bright spot for the U.S. Postal Service, which hadn’t had a break since fax machines started cutting into its business 30 years ago. And federal law requires the USPS to set contract rates, like its proprietary deal with Amazon, that fairly share both the institutional costs of running the service and the incremental cost of adding on more parcel deliveries.

Trump’s fundamental dishonesty is one of the character traits that Republicans rewarded during the primaries, and it’s certainly not something they will discipline now. And while his self-serving attacks on Amazon are, thus far, just typical bloviating, his economic policies are also erratic and fundamentally dishonest. (Our president thinks it’s bragworthy that he made up a lie about trade with Canada in a conversation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.)

The news industry has no power to rein in the administration, as Congress could if Republicans still considered it to be a co-equal branch of government. But journalists could do a great service to the public by adopting better approaches to reporting on economic issues. A good and relatively easy place to start would be in reporting on the stock market, which tends to be covered like a daily sporting event, complete with “points.”

Points don’t mean much to the average person, or even the casual investor, and that’s especially true since their contextual meaning changes from index to index and over time. Last Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average — which most Americans couldn’t define on a bet — sank by more than 750 points before closing down 450 from the previous Friday’s close.

It was a bumpy day for investment professionals, no doubt, especially for investors in presidential nemesis Amazon or in Facebook, which has more fundamental troubles with its business plan.

Meanwhile, the same number of points on the Nasdaq would have meant something completely different, and would have meant something catastrophic on the S&P 500 index. It’s like points in football vs. points in soccer, except these teams seem to be playing the same game.

For most people the bottom line is this: Popular baskets of publicly traded stocks lost about 2 percent of their value that day, and the decline added to a general slide in market value since a rapid runup in 2017 put stocks at levels that probably were not going to be sustainable.

The finance industry has accepted definitions for market trends — correction, bull market, bear market. But a word like “tanked,” which NBC News used last Monday, isn’t the right word for a 2 percent drop.

I’m not even sure it would be justified to describe the trend for the DJIA since it reached its all-time high in January. Some of us are old enough to remember Black Monday — Oct. 19, 1987 — when “plummeted” was a proper word for a 22 percent drop.

Obviously, stock market news is important to tens of millions of us. But daily movements are less important than trends and the reasons for them. Helping our fellow travelers understand this is especially important at a time when points mean less than ever and the markets have not yet learned how to react when the president decides to take his frustrations out on investors.

“Chinga” was written for “The X-Files” by horror novelist Stephen King, who also wrote the greatest tweet of all time: “Conservatives who for 8 years sowed the dragon’s teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon.”

Conservatives who for 8 years sowed the dragon’s teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 3, 2016

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.