Word: dow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these days, the charmless fate of America feels very much like what the poet W.H. Auden described as the state of most poets' output: good ideas, badly executed. Wealthy, work-obsessed, gobbling down small, hurried pleasures in cholesterol-laden chunks as we contemplate the risings and fallings of the Dow, we tend to forget that charm, as Camus observed in The Fall, can provide us with "a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question...
...catch their breath, as may you. The stock market hasn't administered this kind of water torture in 20 years. The incredible irony is that this bear market still isn't official, and we've been in it for a year. Technically, a bear is defined by the Dow's or S&P 500's declining 20%. The S&P is close; it's off 19.2%. So the bear may be on the books by the time you read this. But it really doesn't matter because the torture started 14 months ago when the Dow (down 10.7%) peaked...
...panic has been limited. But then that's what makes it torture. As bad as the '87 crash was (22.6% on the Dow in a day), we were in a new bull market the next morning. Indeed, the '87 "buying opportunity" had much to do with fostering a buy-on-dips mentality that prevailed through the '90s. That mentality is in the process of getting crushed. We've moved from buying dips to just holding on. What comes next is "'Omigod, the stock market is risky,'" which is when people get out, says Nicholas Sargen, strategist at J.P. Morgan Private...
...testimony that saw Greenspan return repeatedly to a favorite topic - the "wealth effect" of the stock markets on the public psyche - the implication was clear: Greenspan intends to see the Dow and the NASDAQ show consumers the way back to the sunny side of the street. And he'll cut interest rates to help bridge the gap between the doldrums of now and the summer days ahead, when those companies finally cost-cut their way back to profitability. At that point, the cycle can begin again...
Another bad week for the markets seemed ready to end with another glum day Friday, with the NASDAQ testing year-old lows again and the Dow giving up 200 points under the weight of tearful earnings reports from Motorola and Sun. The S&P even ushered in an official bear market, hitting 20 percent losses off its highs, but as TIME columnist Dan Kadlec points, we knew that already...