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DOW DROPS BELOW 7,000 POINTS FOR FIRST TIME SINCE 1997
The era of “hope and change” ushered in by the new Obama Administration has thus far been anything but “hope and change.” At least, not the positive kind.
Stocks continued to spiral out of control Monday, despite Obama’s massive spending package and a pork-laden omnibus budget proposal — both of which he said would help stabilize the economy.
For the first time since 1997, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 7,000 points. The Dow bottomed out at 6,918.69 only four minutes after the opening bell before slightly regaining ground.
The S&P 500 Index and NASDAQ also experienced similar 2 percent plunges as investors feared yet another round of federal bailouts.
If word has not yet hit the White House that the economy will not resuscitate itself through giant governmental handouts, hopefully today’s early trading will help expedite the messenger.
I agree that what has been proposed thus far has not helped the Stock Market. Will it help the general economy and will that trickle down to the Stock Market? We will simply have to wait and see. The stock market is not the entire economy, it is only one part. However, its collapse has taken the rest of the economy with it primarily for three reasons. 1) Gas going to 4 and 5 dollars per gallon for an extended period of time crushed the middle class leaving anyone who was stretching to make ends meet unable to pay their mortgage; while simultaneously destroying the country’s only remaining major manufacturing industry, the automobile industry. 2) The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act (which was enacted at the end of the Great Depression to prevent a Wall Street collapse from taking down the rest of the economy) left the banks free to become investment banks and invest their capital reserves in speculative securities. It also allowed banks and insurance companies to become so large that the failure of any one could take the economy with it. Those failures then occurred. 3) Finally, the war in Iraq, stripped the treasury of a trillion dollars and hampered our ability to work with traditional allies to stop the bleeding because much of the world no longer trusted us and so long as it was not impacting them, enjoyed watching us struggle (now they realize it is impacting them, but it may be too late).
The most frightening part is more and more signs are pointing to the possibility that we do not have the resources to stop the collapse of the Stock Market, and we may be no where near the bottom.
Bull, the Republicans brought all of this down on our heads, and now, no matter what anyone does to try and fix the problem, they are going to attack them, the same way they have attacked anyone who criticized them, or disagreed with them for the past 8 years. Acting as though it is a major catastrophe because the market has dropped 800 point under Obama when they presided over a 4500 point drop while telling the public, everything is fine and the economy is fundamentally strong is the height of hypocrisy.” They didn’t know what they were doing then, and they don’t know what they’re doing now.
Maybe Obama does not know how to do to stop this mess, but he is trying, and who should we look to as to how to get out of this hole? Our choices are, the new guy, or the guys who dug the hole and pushed us in.