My former boss used to say it was ridiculous for journalists to write about any increase or decrease in “uncertainty.”
His point: “everything is always uncertain.”
Journalists write about uncertainty not because it exists, but because people talk about it.
People talk about it because they experience fluctuating levels of anxiety about the future.
To the degree we can gauge “uncertainty,” we can say with some certainty that it peaked in the last week of March.
That coincided with the recent bottom for U.S. stocks on March 23, the same day I started working from home and life as we know it seemed to be ending.
In addition to “uncertainty”, reporters have been using “unprecedented” steadily less.
Bloomberg even wrote a news article a month ago forecasting the end of the unprecedented use of unprecedented.
They were right.
Ted Merz 