Justin Wolfers

And just to be really clear on the stakes here, Ed, as you said, markets rose very strongly on news that these talks were going ahead.

Probably about a third of it unwound as it appeared that the Iranians were not so confident that anyone had ever called them.

So that right there tells you that markets are

believed that our president is slightly more credible than the Iranian leadership, but not substantially so.

Look, 1% on the S&P 500 is $600 billion.

Maybe it rose about 1.5%, actually, if I remember.

So that's about a trillion dollars.

There's about 100 million American households.

So that says...

Whether the president was telling the truth or not makes a difference in the wealth of the average American household of plus or minus $10,000.

It's just a way of saying the stakes here are incredibly high and we are sailing through fog at midnight with a blindfold on while listening to the sweet, sweet tunes of our president telling us what may or may not be happening.

Yeah, so...

For sure, over the next few weeks, lots of people are going to say financial markets are crazy, they're hormonal, why are they moving up or down like crazy?

Right.

But if you're actually in a situation where there's two choices we could make, aggression, non-aggression, and they have huge effects on the economy...

and we don't know the probability and we really, really don't know the probability if we end up here or here, then small statements rationally lead to large re-evaluations of the value of stocks, of your future forecast for the economy, of bond rates, the whole nine yards.

So things are going to look crazy.

It will... But I think here this is not a statement about...

financial markets necessarily being temperamental.

It's more a statement about the president's inability to convince anyone that what he's saying he means.