Suddenly the Number Everyone's Watching Is 52 -- as in B-52

One minute the head of the New York Stock Exchange is throwing Dow 10,000 hats (a bit prematurely) on to the floor, and the next waves of B-52s are taking off from airfields in Europe.

It is almost uncanny that when stocks start to get a little stretched, when traders start talking about how the market has run ahead of itself, some outside event comes knocking. If times were different, if the market weren't knocking on a milestone that finally made people think about how far it has gone, and how rich valuations have gotten, would trouble in Serbia really be hurting the market like it did yesterday? Just to put some perspective on it, the thing that is getting the wood in The New York Post this morning is not airstrikes, but a story on how the New York City police commissioner got flown to the Oscars on the Revlon (REV Quote) corporate jet.

This is not meant to diminish the seriousness of what's going on: It's deadly serious. But recall that when bombs fell on Baghdad on Dec. 16, stocks paused and then ran higher. ...