The Comforting Patter of CNBC, WSJ and Bloomberg

At Motorola's Holtsville office, CNBC plays all day in the cafeteria. I sometimes wonder why.

I guess it's what management thinks people are supposed to watch at breakfast or lunch. Business people should eat, breathe and sleep business, right?

After all, most of the coverage describes various facets of our big interconnected financial ecosystem. So, while munching your turkey sandwich, why not try to connect the dots between, say, Enterprise Mobility, ethanol, foreign inflows of capital, and all those intra-day stock charts.

Usually during lunch, instead, I read the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page on my Motorola Q. From it I get a quick, journalistically responsible snapshot of the pro-free-market zeitgeist. The only downside: I gave up on politics years ago. But the mobile Internet and the Journal have pushed me off the wagon.

Finally, for the drive home, there's the engaging Tom Keene and Bloomberg on the Economy. I feel morally obligated to listen to a radio program whose promos regularly begin with "Coming up next, the full hour with Nobel laureate . . . "

This is one radio host who wants to talk about more than the first three pages of morning paper. Keene's show prep includes reading, as he often describes them in his trademark gravelly voice, "magisterial tomes." I don't always follow the discussion well, but damn if this guy isn't trying to raise the bar! He makes PBS look like ESPN.

Whether or not I am engaged all the time, this daily patter, with eyes on the ephemeral, the daily, or the long term respectively, comforts me. The human ecosystem is doing what it is supposed to do. Market information is flowing; price signals are working.

I don't fear tyranny so long as conversations like these are carrying on. That is the greatest comfort of all.