AIG Bailout, Stock Market Drop, Bank Closures, & Federal Reserve News - No Big Deal?
September 17, 2008
Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt, struggling Merrill Lynch is bought out by Bank of America, and AIG is bailed out by the US government – so who cares?
According to a tool from Google that displays the trends on what people are searching for online, the financial turmoil engulfing the US this week isn’t prompting that many people to seek out information about the issues. Monday night football, politics and fall TV premiers are coming in ahead of the financial woes. The trends tool shows the top 100 hot search items; I pulled the applicable ones I saw for Monday & Tuesday, plus Wednesday morning, and listed them below.
As you can see, financial topics only compose a small portion of the searching trends. Based on these numbers it looks as though people have a lot of things on their mind other than the economy. I would have thought the top few would have been all about the financial markets but they weren’t.
September 17th
57) AIG bailout
64) AIG ceo
66) Suze Orman
84) reserve fund
98) Morgan Stanley merger
September 16th
3) reserve primary fund
14) conservatorship
15) AIG bailout
42) AIG conservatorship
72) after hours trading
84) morgan stanley earnings
September 15th
10) AIG stock
32) Ken Lewis
47) stock market today
48) are we in a depression
54) stock market
62) cnbc live
68) ken lewis bank of america
80) lehman brothers bankruptcy
82) FDIC insurance limits
87) AIG life insurance
91) AIG annuity
I’m not sure if people are getting the coverage instead from the major news outlets or if they just aren’t that concerned. I wonder if that suggests many consumers are out of touch with the economy and it’s effect on their lives; or if the tool’s just showing inconclusive data.
Whatever the reason, it’s probably a good thing the top 30 searches weren’t all about financial doom and gloom as that could indicate a run on the banks or even more financial meltdowns. Let’s hope tomorrow there are no searches for any other major financial institutions.
To be fair, the coverage is so widespread across the internet you don’t really have to search to find articles about what’s going on. I am interested that there doesn’t seem to be much “digging deeper” searching going on.
It pops up automatically in my email news alerts, so I don’t have to go searching for it. And I talked directly to my “money man” to get the low down on what I needed, or didn’t need, to be doing to ‘keep safe’… if such a thing is possible.
Of course, when I looked at the top 100 list, I was amazed that I had NO clue who some of those top 20 people were…. probably cuz I DON’T have TV
We’ll be seeing the Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley searches shortly!
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