I hate to say “I told you so,” but you have to be careful with those godforsaken doomsday headlines which proliferate across the mainstream financial media whenever there’s a hiccup somewhere.

Of course, it’s even worse in the darker corners of the so-called macro-market “blogosphere,” where verbosity, jargon and a veneer of subject matter-specific expertise impart to otherwise unreliable analysis an air of faux sophistication. (And yes, I realize I’m the pot calling the kettle black with that criticism. “Let he without sin cast the first stone, so I built that all glass quad-level first home.”)

Fear sells, and you’re a customer. Never forget that whether you get your financial news from venerable sources like Bloomberg and the FT or from… well, you know. (And if you don’t know by now, you damn well should.)

Last week, I went out of my way to emphasize that the hand-wringing over Jamie Dimon’s “roach” comment was probably overwrought, and the contagion narrative spun around bad loan disclosures from Zions and Western Alliance even more so. Fast forward two business days from what one mainstream outlet dubbed a “mini-crisis” and what do we see? This:

Headed into the closing bell on Monday, US shares were on track for their best two-session rally since June.

There were a number of factors which contributed to Monday’s gains, including and especially a great session for Apple and Donald Trump’s latest off-the-cuff musings on the prospects for a trade deal with China (Monday was a “good Trump” day on that front).

But more broadly, there simply wasn’t anything worth panicking about last week. The real silly part of the whole regional bank “mini-crisis” narrative was that the associated selloff, if you can call it that (you can’t) on October 16 amounted to all of 63bps on the S&P.

While everyone was busy looking for Dimon’s roaches, three quarters of the S&P companies which’ve reported earnings so far have beat on the bottom line by at least a standard deviation of consensus, according to Goldman. The historical average is just 46%.

There’s a long way to go yet (only 12% of the index had reported through Friday), but you get the point: Obsessing over $150 million or so in bad loans at a couple of regional banks when JPMorgan, Goldman, BofA and Morgan Stanley all notched record quarters on one metric or another, was asinine.

I’m by no means suggesting there are no problems “lurking below the surface,” to employ the almost standardized phrase journalists use to set up foreboding articles about a prospective correction for an equity market trading on a 100%ile forward multiple, I’m just saying what Nomura’s Charlie McElligott said Monday upon returning from a trip to Japan. Last week was “much ado about idiosyncratic nothings.”

He alluded to Tricolor (a “bad business model”) and the apparent shell game at “Cantor Group” (“lending with elements of outright fraud”) and called the fretting over private credit “hyperventilation about a small share of assets” in the space which anyway “act[s] as a shock absorber” compared to the 2008 scenario when leveraged exposure to risky borrowers was daisy-chained across big bank balance sheets. “The early start to financials reporting season showed good trends on lower provisions for credit losses,” he went on.

So, don’t forget who you are to the media outlets — both mainstream and otherwise — where you get your news. You’re a customer first and everything else second. There are rare exceptions — The New Yorker, for example — but by and large, the main goal’s to keep you clicking and scrolling, not to inform you. And the best way to do that is very often to scare the hell out of you.

The cruel irony is that this can breed complacency, which in turn raises the stakes for the eventual moment when there actually is a crisis in the offing. It’s as if every time the boy cried wolf, the number of villagers at risk in the event of an actual wolf attack rose. In the market context, complacency itself becomes a justification for scary-sounding headlines, which often come across as desperate attempts to gin up web traffic during rallies and are thereby ignored as superfluous fearmongering creating still more complacency.

With that in mind, I’ll leave you with a throwback. The passages below are from a 2017 note penned by former Deutsche Bank rates strategist Aleksandar Kocic,

When information becomes a commodity, it takes very little time for it to lose its value. Unlike other (physical) commodities whose price is driven by diminishing supply, information markets are exact opposite — their essence is captured by diminishing demand. On one side, there is nothing to slow down its supply — it costs nothing to produce it. On the other, demand for information is biologically constrained by our capacity to absorb a limited amount of it. So, sooner or later, we have to reach a state of semiotic inflation where more information buys less meaning. The rate at which we reach this point depends only on the efficiency of the media. It is safe to say that in the last decade, especially the last five years, we have witnessed an accelerated approach to the state of super-fluid information flows.

This is when the positive feedback begins. When we operate under informational overload, we tend to defend ourselves by filtering excess information. It means that we are deliberately underplaying the importance of its content and implicitly questioning credibility of its sources. This can be perceived by those who observe us (our parents, guardians, parole officers, risk managers…) as troubling. And the more we ignore their warnings, the more they will be warning us. This is an example of disappearance due to proliferation: Filtering of the information forces its proliferation which is further ignored (we can’t absorb any more) and its production further reinforced until it is completely ignored and, therefore, invisible.