In the weeks before an election – never mind the week after – it is normal for politicians and journalists to rush excitedly round the country to divine the mood of the populace … and discover it is one of total indifference.
But those rates are still consistent with central-bank inflation targets.There is a problem, however, with using market numbers to divine the mood of private-sector investors: central banks have been intervening heavily in the bond markets at both ends of the yield curve.
Over the past few days, it has become especially difficult to divine the mood of the ECB's 21-member governing council, represented by the 15-strong euro area and a six-member executive board.
POLITICIANS and psephologists have tried desperately hard to divine the Scottish mood over the past year.
For six years now, often with my colleague John Domokos, I have been travelling around the UK for our video series Anywhere But Westminster, ostensibly covering politics, but really trying to divine the national mood, if such a thing exists.
The speeded-up, concentrated release schedule that has become the norm over the past decade has made the panic sown by Sept. 11 especially dramatic, as the studios have pulled some big movies from release and rescheduled others in a desperate attempt to divine the public mood.
Tempest could sometimes have varied her delivery, but the sounds she used (a man listing types of fish, the swish of the stones) were lovely and the mood was divine.
In "Girl with Blue Shoes," the subject sits sidesaddle on a straight-backed chair, wearing sandals, a matching hair band, and a candy-striped shift; the creamy background is modulated only by a flat blue shadow, and it's impossible to divine the girl's mood.
One result is that -- apart from the epic HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers," which began its run two days before the terrorist attacks -- what promised to be a season of dramas involving men in uniform has been overtaken by events, illustrating the unease that film and television storytellers are feeling as they struggle to divine the nation's roiling mood.
