Shhh! You'll just make it angry.

It seems to be a lesson the government can't quite get its head around: that to talk about the stock market is to tempt fate.

James Fitz-Morris

Asked today about Canada's first trade deficit in 33 years, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day called the news "concerning" but also "predictable."

He then tried to show what a great job the government is doing on the economic front by saying, "You saw in the TSX as recently as about an hour ago, there’s a slight increase in the TSX even though these negative export numbers came out."

Two hours later the TSX was down almost 200 points from that high Day had been talking about.

In October, Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested there were "buying opportunities" in the stock market crash — and over the course of the next three days the TSX dropped even more dramatically.

Now, I'm not saying that either of these two incidents directly caused investors to get angry and dump their holdings for fear of even bigger losses.

But it is a lesson governments seem never to learn: if you're going to try to take credit when the market rises, you'll end up being blamed when it falls. When, in fact, neither case is true.

— James Fitz-Morris