A CNN.com article, for example, blames yesterday’s stock market plunge on a selloff.

But there was no selloff; every seller requires a buyer.

Just as more people were selling, so were more people buying. Describing yesterday’s market as a selloff only tells half the story.

The same article says that today’s 600-point gain happened when “investors scooped up a variety of shares.” But those buyers cannot buy unless somebody sells to them. Again, the article only tells half the story. And here is one case where two halves do not a whole make.

So what really happened yesterday and today? High trading volume. That may not sound very exciting. But at least it’s accurate.

Flaws and all, the article can still teach us an important lesson, if only we let it: sometimes financial reporters don’t know what they’re talking about.

Don’t believe everything you read, in other words.

Something to keep in mind while trying to make sense of these troubled times.

Each poster features an earnest-looking adult who vows to consume less energy—or at least think about it. Here are some of the captions: “I will use less energy,” “I will leave the car at home more,” “I will unplug stuff more,” “I will reuse more stuff,” “I will finally get a programmable thermostat,” “I will carpool to work,” “I will consider a hybrid” (how bold!), and (bolder still), “I will take my golf clubs out of the trunk.” 

To join Chevron means repenting of our fuelish ways. It means buying less of Chevron’s products. But if buying less is good, then buying none is better. Doesn’t Chevron CEO Dave O’Reilly understand this simple logic?

Maybe Mr. O’Reilly thinks Chevron will earn green brownie points by talking as if oil consumption were an addiction to be broken. But de-legitimizing his company’s product is suicidal, because instead of appeasing those who seek to tax and regulate Big Oil out of existence, disparaging energy use will only reinforce the perception that the oil bashers occupy the moral high ground.

Until and unless Chevron changes its tune and starts explaining why abundant, affordable energy is essential to human flourishing, I will “join” Chevron by boycotting its products. And if enough consumers join the boycott, then maybe, just maybe, Chevron will wise up.

Even with the higher prices, [CITGO station owner Bipin] Ganhdi ran out of gas by mid-afternoon Friday. He is hoping his next shipment will come Friday night, and he has no idea what it will cost when it gets to his pumps.

He goes on to note a suggestion from AAA:

If you have more than a quarter of a tank of gas, then don’t rush to fill up.

Wait 24 to 48 hours and see what Ike does when it finally makes it to land and the oil refineries

That’s sage advice from AAA, but such advice wouldn’t be needed if price mechanisms were allowed to work freely in North Carolina. Unfortunately, the Governor of the Tar Heel State is trying to wish-away those market forces. The Associated Press reports that:

Gov. Mike Easley has declared a state of “abnormal market disruption” and signed an order allowing the attorney general to enforce North Carolina’s anti-gouging law.

Going on to explain the governor’s economic thinking:

Easley said wholesale prices were up less than 20 cents a gallon and consumers shouldn’t see prices rise substantially more than the wholesale increase.

Easley’s understanding of economics leaves something to be desired. Wholesale prices are, of course, just one component of the price of gas. Certainly local spikes in demand play a part, and that’s not a bad thing.

No AAA warnings would be needed if prices were allowed to rise, keeping everyone but those who absolutely need gasoline from consuming the gasoline that may be hard to come by in the next few days. If prices stay high, it sends a clear message to suppliers to get gas to the Carolinas, where there is money to be made.

Unfortunately for the people of North Carolina their governor missed a few economics classes in school and believes that price controls are the way to go. I hope North Carolinians realize that cheap gas isn’t so great when all the pumps have run dry.

But the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly an indictment of the free market: Fannie and Freddie are “Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” not products of the free market or the private sector.

Moreover, mortgage lending is not exactly an unregulated, free market. Just a few days ago, Pearlstein himself admitted in his column that federal affordable-housing mandates deserved a “good chunk of the responsibility” for the Fannie and Freddie failures that he now blames on the free market. (Earlier, we noted that federal regulations promoting “affordable housing” and “diversity” helped cause the real estate bubble and the mortgage crisis).

You don’t have to be a right-winger to see that government regulation caused, rather than mitigated, the mortgage crisis. An August 5 article in the liberal Village Voice explains how Clinton’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo helped pave the way for the mortgage meltdown by ratcheting up federal affordable-housing mandates. Cuomo and HUD forced Fannie and Freddie to buy more sub-prime morgages, as part of Cuomo’s crusade to increase the number of minority homeowners. Now, of course, the crusade has backfired. Many minority homeowners have suffered financially as a result of recent falls in home value that wiped out their homeowners’ equity — a fall that resulted from buying homes during a mortgage bubble fueled by HUD’s pressure on lenders to make risky, high-interest loans to people with little savings (many of whom have defaulted, helping to drive lenders into bankruptcy). And they’ve ended up with costly high-interest mortgages in the process. (Ironically, Cuomo, now New York’s attorney general, blames lenders for causing the mortgage crisis through “predatory lending” — lending he helped promote as HUD secretary).

(By the way, if you want to buy the little two bedroom house that I misguidedly purchased during the real estate bubble for its current assessed value — $590,000 — I’d be happy to sell. Why does the federal government consider homeownership such a blessing, and seek to encourage it at every turn? Home prices aren’t as high as they once were, but they are still ridiculously high in many regions, partly due to all the people vying to buy homes in the recent real estate bubble).

Fannie and Freddie may be nominally private, but they enjoy a a host of privileges and immunities typically enjoyed only by governments, and annually cost the taxpayer about $10 billion a year even before the current multibillion dollar bailout, which may cost taxpayers up to $300 billion. Like the Post Office, Fannie and Freddie are exempt from state and local taxes, and sales and property taxes, and some of their officers are selected by the federal government. And they are of governmental origin: Fannie was officially a federal entity for the first 30 years of its existence, and the federal government sponsored the creation of both Fannie and Freddie.

But that fact seems to be lost on both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Corn futures at the Chicago Board of Trade surged as much as 4 percent on Tuesday, with an all-time high of $6.60-3/4 a bushel set by the July 2009 contract.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s weekly agriculture summary, the pace of planting is significantly slower this year:

Corn: Twenty-seven percent of the Nation’s corn crop was planted by week’s end, 18 and 32 points behind last year and the 5-year average, respectively. In the central Corn Belt, Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley, and central Great Plains, producers gained momentum and were able to plant 20 percent or more of their crop between rain showers, but remained well behind normal in most areas. Elsewhere, farmers planted at a slower pace, awaiting warm, dry conditions to resume fieldwork. Progress was the farthest behind normal from Missouri and Illinois northward.

If lower crop production occurs, higher prices could add to rising food costs.

And, of course, the increased use of corn for biofuels has exacerbated the rise.  As the USDA noted in a May 2008 report:

The data suggest that while U.S. corn used for ethanol production had only a small effect on global markets in the 1980s and 1990s, the increase in U.S. ethanol production over the past 5 years and the related significant changes in the structure of the U.S. corn market have had a more pronounced impact on the world’s supply and demand balance for total coarse grains recently. Importantly, since the United States is the world’s largest corn exporter, some of the higher prices resulting from increased U.S. demand has spilled over onto world markets.