Boon and bust

Boons (and booms) are Nooops and Aahs; busts are oops (financial or otherwise).

Today, the DOW close (down 444.99 to 7,552.29) is getting back to an area that we have not seen for several years; the low close today beats the 2003 lowest close, so now we're talking back to 1998. A year ago (the high close near 14K), many knew that this downturn was a very likely (and, perhaps, long overdue) outcome.

How low can it go? Well, would not it be great if we could go back to the 1995 level and restart (with a good look at idiocy and fairy dusting) the economy. Ah, the genie is out of the bottle. CBOE exists; computation is the main tool.

In the period since then 1995, we could count several bubbles. However, too, we saw a very large increase in the pockets of a few while the many have been left holding the bag or have been left without any bag.

The financial services industry made outrageous money. Do not forget the millions (tens and tens) that Grasso took out of his supposedly public service job.

So, are the richer smarter? Well, they play some type of game better, assuming that we can take accumulation of wealth as an adequate measure (an open issue, including T-issues).

Remarks:

12/01/2008 -- Well, in the past week, the markets went up about 19% such as to give some hope. Then, today, they crashed again. There are several de-stablizing factors that we ought to look at, some of these we can control.

11/24/2008 -- In the last two days, the DOW (and other indexes) were up 11% which is a record or close to one. With this type of volatility, how does one plan? Well, that's one problem to be considered.

Modified: 12/05/2008