Blue Monday

Three years ago, Dr Cliff Arnall from the University of Cardiff, calculated an algorithm suggesting that in 2008, Monday 21 January would be the most depressing day of the year. The co-relation between dark, depressing weather, the long wait until spring arrives, post-Xmas debt, all conspire between them to lower spirits across the Northern Hemisphere. (He also worked out that the happiest day of the year is in late June.) 

And talking of darkness, today is a full month after the winter solstice, and there's only 45 minutes more daylight than on the shortest day. Two months to equinox, and there's still three and half hours to make up to the full 12 hours. 

Back in the early 1980s, I observed a co-relation between the weather and movements on the London Stock Exchange. We had in the office an old Press Association newswire machine, printing out data all day long. When the weather was nice, the market indices had a habit of rising, and vice versa. The tendency was weak, but I'd guess that if you had to make a bet on which way the markets were moving just on the basis of weather, you'd get it right - consistently - 52 times out of 100. Add a bit of market insight to the weather data, and you could get 55 out of 100. Enough to make a small profit. If I had posited such a theory 25 years ago, I would have been accused of being a swivel-eyed, tin-foil-hat-wearing nutter; today, the link between economics and human biometerology has been noted. 

Anyway, yesterday, the combination of 'Blue Monday' and dire sentiments on the financial markets led to what portal Money.pl called 'financial apocalypse'. The main Warsaw index lost 5.5% in one day, while shares in London lost £77 billion in value. Less in percentage terms than Warsaw, but London's brokers are more experienced and have been through those situations when panic breaks loose, prices are in free-fall and they've already lost their clients significant chunks of their personal wealth. 

In Warsaw, the fundamentals should have been good enough to keep the market afloat. Yesterday the IMF uprated Poland's GDP growth prospects for 2008 upwards from 4.2% to 5%. That really is good news. Yet the shares kept on tanking. It must have been the weather - "It rained and it rained. It rained both night and day. The people got worried; they began to cry. Lord have mercy, where can we go to now?" * 

Dr Cliff should have noted that 21 January 2008 is Martin Luther King Day in the US, and that Wall Street would be closed. I watch with interest as to what will happen on the world's financial markets today. Here in Warsaw, it's still raining. Below: ul. Poloneza, submerged.

  * John Lee Hooker, Tupelo