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American Morning

America's New War: Stocks Market Opens After Down Day Yesterday

Aired September 20, 2001 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange. It is opening bell time.

We, obviously, just missed the ringing of the bell, but some of the folks that are standing there were representatives from the sanitation department, the police department, fire department, the office of corrections and the U.S. Army National Guard.

You didn't hear the bell, right, Andy. I didn't hear it, but they said might have been underneath that.

Andy Serwer is here, an expert from "Fortune" magazine. Give us a preview of what investors might expect today given what the market did yesterday.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well, it was a very crummy day yesterday, Paula. Stocks were way down. They actually came back a little bit the worst levels of the day. But the Asian markets weak, down 2-3 percent. Trading in Europe was very week. And the sentiment is very negative right now, quite frankly. Yesterday, there was some real fear in the market as investors, institutional investors and ordinary investors sold stocks across the board.

Again, the only good news is that we didn't close in the worst levels of the day. We had a kind of rally at the end of the day.

ZAHN: What are the trends investigators should be looking for today?

SERWER: Well, I think what they have to be concerned about is this ripple effect, is this situation where different parts of the economy are going to come under pressure, and investors move from sector to sector, from technology to hotels, to airlines, to consumer products, to housing companies, and sell them out, as they say, in Wall Street lingo, and look for places of weakness and go there, but I think also you will see things where they will look to buy stocks.

It's so confusing right now, just to give you an idea, Paula. Just to give you an idea, usually when you have a crisis that involves the Middle East, oil stocks, price of oil will go up, but because there are concerns about a recession right now, oil stocks and the price of oil actually went down yesterday.

So you know, all bets are off in this type of environment. Very confusing for people on Wall Street.

ZAHN: So for the folks who don't have steel guts and who have their investments wrapped up in mutual funds, do they stay in their with those?

SERWER: You know, it's so hard to say that in this environment, but I think the answer is yes; particularly, if you have, say, a 10- year time horizon, it really doesn't make sense to sell stocks right now. If you have a wedding planned in November, and you need the money that's in stocks, I will say, you might want to think about selling them to make sure you have that cash in hand. Otherwise, if you're looking at retirement down the line, you got to believe that we are closer to a bottom than a top. You would just be selling out close to a bottom, the wrong time to sell. It's a counterintuitive thing, but very important for investors to remember.

ZAHN: And of course this volatility comes at a time when you have a number of economists in the United States saying we are in recession. We had a guest on the air yesterday who said, forget the conventional definitions of a recession, forget two quarters in a row of blah, blah, blah, we are in a recession.

SERWER: You know, I'd have to agree with that. Again, it's just a definition thing. They always also revise these government statistics in terms of growth. So we may go back to the second quarter and see we actually were contracting then. The third quarter we are in now, it's hard to see any growth. And then going forward, again, with the ripple effects of these attacks on the economy, it's very hard to see how we are in a growth mode.

ZAHN: Give us the latest this morning on the airline industry, more bad news, more people being laid off. Even British Airways is announcing that, what 7,000 people will find themselves out of work.

SERWER: Yes, it's very disturbing actually, Paula, that it's spreading to all different kinds of industries. If you include Boeing with the other layoffs, you are getting toward 100,000 people in that industry being laid off, and including British Airways. That is the size of city. I mean, that's a massive amount of people. And obviously, that has a tremendous ripple effect. We keep coming back to that, but it's really true, a ripple effect in the economy. Those people will be buying less goods, spending less money, not buying homes, trying to find jobs. The economy has to take a hit when that kind of thing happens.

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