Top Takes From RealMoney

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4. Sugar and Confidence?
By Howard Simons
12:15 p.m. EDT

Actual news headline on Bloomberg: "White Sugar Drops in London on U.S. Consumer Confidence Slump."

So much nonsense compressed into such a small space! What, is someone sitting in a London bakery going to forgo a biscuit because of a backward-looking survey in the U.S.? Are Belgian beet-growers going to squeeze more sugar out of their crop because of boo-hooing in Baltimore?

I miss the old days when raw sugar futures traded in the pits of New York. No stop was safe; put it in, and they were going to get it. But at least they manipulated the market the old-fashioned way, good and honest, and didn't enlist the support of wire-service reporters.

Hey, there's a non-government organization we can start: Instead of Doctors Without Borders, we could start "Reporters Without Clues." Nominations are being accepted.

No positions.

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5. Consumer Confidence
By Tim Melvin
2:12 p.m. EDT

To reconcile Main Street and Wall Street is going to require a lot more than this little selloff. As stock prices have done a rocket ship imitation in the past three months, Main Street has continued to get worse.

I spent a lot of time talking to people I meet about how they see the world right now. Those not inside the Beltway or between the rivers are not optimistic right now and see things getting worse.

I would love to see some of the cheerleaders leave their desks and go into a local watering hole in small-town America and explain the concept of "green shoots" and "less bad" being good to some of the people losing their jobs and homes. Ultimately I think Wall Street will feel Main Street's pain as it is reflected in corporate profits. That pain involves more than a 100-point selloff.

No positions.

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