Now that stocks are in shambles after several days of panic, the financial newspapers are waxing poetic about fear. The fear of fear itself, that is. It is as though financial journalists are having trouble with the very notion that they are addressing a herd and nothing but a herd. Herds are prone to panic, of course. This is in their nature, as it were. Luckily, the weekend has intervened. The panic might subside by the next trading week. Which is why weekends exist in the first place. To their credit, stockmarket fathers thought of the herd from the very first day.