Politics: Secret Message: Bloody Death Good For Business

Several news items have cropped up (including this Reuters item here) exclaiming with glee that the bloody death of Saddam Hussein's two sons (and good riddance) is somehow good for the stock market. The pieces all talk about this intangible link between good news and bad news, and how that affects the stock market.

This is just sickening, if you stop and think about it. "We caught and killed a terrible pair of men who exacted awful pain on their fellow countrymen for years. I'm going to buy some Texas Instruments stock to celebrate!" The oblique conclusion you could draw is that the war has been seeming for the recent past like a bad idea, and the people who buy and sell stock were concerned that their favorite president was going to get in trouble for getting involved in this war. Now that we killed Uday and Qusay, their favorite president isn't in such trouble.

I guess I just resent the idea that this killing, which is strategically meaningless but could provide a huge public relations boon to a White House honestly concerned about re-election, is actually good for American business. Where do I go to look up what kind of impacts various killing has on the market? What was the market ramification of the hundreds of dead Liberians this week? What about the salsa-singer index? Does anyone register the stock-market implications of a dozen and a half dead in Kashmir?