A reader scolded us for Friday morning’s top headline: “‘Spiral of fear’ drives stocks down again.”

The reader asked if the Post-Dispatch is trying to create a panic, noting that we’ve had a steady drumbeat of “fear” in Page One lead headlines recently.

Thursday, Sept. 18: “Flashes of fear grip investors”

Tuesday, Sept. 30: “Fear rushes in”

Sunday, Oct. 5: “Hope. And a little fear.”

Among other recent lead headlines: “‘Entire economy is in danger’” “‘This sucker could go down’” (Both quoted President Bush.)

Certainly, the Post-Dispatch isn’t capable of creating global panic and plummeting world markets. But how much of the current market mess is caused by fear feeding on itself?

Post-Dispatch Business writer Tim Logan analyzes that question in an article that ran on the front page of Sunday’s Post-Dispatch.

His article starts:

“If there’s one word you heard more than any other to describe the mood of the economy last week, it was: Fear.
Fear was in the faces of traders on newspaper front pages and cable TV.
Fear was quantified in the hefty drops in stock markets each day, in the 18 percent plunge the Dow Jones Industrial Average took between 8 a.m. Monday and 3 p.m. Friday.
And all week, fear threatened to spread like a virus, beyond the stock markets and even the credit markets into the lives of business owners and middle-class Americans worried about their jobs, their savings and their companies, who may well shut their wallets and drive the economy into an even deeper funk.
As President Bush put it Friday morning, using a more euphemistic term for fear, ‘anxiety can feed anxiety,’ and in economic matters, that’s a bad thing.”

Logan’s article digs into the psychology of fear. In the end, he reports, fear can be a healthy thing.