Reverse Spin: Airline crash puts markets on skids

Wall Street got off to a pretty tense start last week.

Stocks initially plummeted Monday after the crash of a passenger plane in New York intensified fears of more terrorist attacks.

The markets skidded at the open, with major indexes down more than 2% after an American Airlines plane carrying 246 passengers and nine crew members crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all those aboard.

“The plumes of smoke floating into the New York sky probably just brought back so many bad memories that just as an emotional knee-jerk reaction, we sold off,” Charles Payne, an analyst at Wall Street Strategies Inc. in New York, reportedly said.

Stocks climbed back up later in the day as federal officials suggested that the cause of the crash was accidental.

Shooting star

From cheers to jeers … to a book deal.

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. Internet analyst Henry Blodget, who gained notoriety in the late 1990s as a cheerleader for almost any company with a dot-com after its name, said Thursday he would relinquish his job on Wall Street to write a book about the dot-com craze.

Mr. Blodget, 35, said he has simply grown tired after spending the past several years watching stocks for 80 hours a week.

“This is not a job that is sustainable at the intensity level I’ve been running at over the last several years,” he reportedly said.

Mr. Blodget, who reportedly accepted a severance package from Merrill worth $2 million, climbed on the dot-com rocket in 1998 as an analyst for what was then CIBC Oppenheimer.

He predicted that shares of online retailer Amazon.com Inc. would hit $400.

The stock, which was trading at $240 at the time of his daring call, blew past Mr. Blodget’s target within a month, and a star was born.

“It’s been surreal, both on the way up and the way down,” Mr. Blodget reportedly said.

“My personal experience has been very different than the experience of this cartoon character that’s been created, called Henry Blodget.

“It’s been interesting, sometimes amusing and frustrating, watching that.”

Something tells me that a lot of investors don’t think the Henry Blodget cartoon was very funny.

No one puts out

For a nation often derided for its salacious ways, we are just not putting out like we used to.

U.S. industrial output in October took its biggest plunge in nearly 11 years.

The drop also marks the longest run of monthly declines since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve said Friday.

The output of the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell 1.1% in October – the biggest decrease since November 1990, when it fell 1.3%.

The latest drop, which came on the heels of a 1% drop in September, marked the 13th consecutive fall in output – the longest such stretch since the 15 months ended July 1932.

Buffett feels the heat

And you think your portfolio is down a few bucks?

Warren Buffett, the professional investors’ investor, saw the value of his company’s portfolio drop $10.4 billion during the first nine months of the year, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed on Wednesday.

At the end of September, his Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. held $27.2 billion worth of stock, down from $37.6 billion at the end of last year.

The bulk of the losses came from the shrinking stock values of such holdings as American Express Co. and The Coca-Cola Co.