Chorus

"On a good day, we can part the seas. On a bad day, glory is beyond our reach."

Friday, September 18, 2009

Dow Breakpoint

The DOW closed this week above another breakpoint: 9,800.  Just for sake of history, the first time the DJIA (a.k.a. "The DOW") closed above 9,800 was March 1999 (in fact, it started shy of 9,700 and it closed at 10,006.78 that month) and I believe it closed below 9,800 most recently on October 6, 2008, so depending on your definition of "recovery," the recovery of the aforementioned Lehman Brothers bankruptcy only took one year (the financial definition of "recovery" is technically when we set a new high, but I think that's a misnomer because it assumes that the market is never over-inflated, and everybody knows that is possible).

Monday, September 14, 2009

CNNFN: Events That Broke Wall Street

The events that broke Wall Street: A shocking series of events that forever changed the financial markets
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/news/0809/gallery.week_that_broke_wall_street/

A year ago, the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a series of stunning events from which Wall Street is still recovering.

Seemingly every day for about month, a different legendary financial company teetered on collapse.  Stocks recorded some of their most dramatic drops in history, including the Dow's epic 778-point drop on Sept. 29 -- the biggest ever single-day slide.  And lawmakers worked overtime in an effort to stem off a failure of the financial system.

The solution: a series of unprecedented and expensive bailouts to save systemically significant institutions from failing and to loosen the tight grip on credit.



Today is the one-year anniversary of the biggest event to shake Wall Street to its core in the most recent market downturn: the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers. The DOW tumbled as far down as 6500 in March 2009 before it has made a steady recovery (although most analysts feel as though the "recovery" has been backtracking lost ground because the investors in large over-reacted to the news). Regardless, this 33-date timeline from the above link is interesting from a historical perspective (granted, it's no fall of ENRON but somewhat interesting nonetheless).