Dow - Up or down ? Which comes first, 6500 or 7500?

Thanks for cracking me up with that image.

LOVE that photo, Petefin! The Dow used to move with hemlines-- I am SURE this qualifies!

If that's the case, I think it's time for a resurgency of miniskirts and short-shorts!

and let's make them for men too!!!!!!!!

close yesterday 7,170.06
it just may have bottom out and gradually on the improve?
love the shorts

I like your optimism, Curios, but the fundimentals haven't changed. There's still millions of homeowners going into default on their mortgages, the home construction industry has come to a halt, interbank lending isn't happening because nobody knows who holds bad debt, and corporate earnings are still in the tank. This is just a classic bear market rally. We'll be back under 6500 before too long. While this rally might actually hit the top of this market in the next week, sooner or later reality will settle in again.

I think we can all agree we've seen the bottom, thanks very much for that petefin :D

been down so ....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNavZ_-A0wA

LOL, good song c2r!

I have a bad feeling that before long we'll be talking about 4000 range

Thats ridiculous. I gaurentee on my life that no one on earth will live to see the day that the dow jones will drop to 4k. Thats, government starts defaulting at there loans level. Thats 500% of population without jobs levels. Thats learn mandurin and move to china levels.

dragon, maybe you can't remember but the first time the DJIA actually closed above the 4k mark is only 14 years ago.

Yes but a lot happens in 14 years. Think of all the pop singers that went in and out of style? 14 years is like 400 years to them. In this present climate which is a lot different than what it was 14 years ago, 4k would mean total economic collapse on a scale we can barley imagine.

If dragon's prediction track record is an indicator, I wouldn't put much stock in his guarantees. :)

dragon - Thats ridiculous. I gaurentee on my life that no one on earth will live to see the day that the dow jones will drop to 4k. - you said the samething about dow 9,000. :O)

Yes but the difference is i was wrong about the 9k one.

To put it in context. If the worst 6 companies on the dow could fell to zero it cause the DJIA to lose only about 100 points. For the DJIA to fall to 4000 the remaining 24 would have to shed an average of $17 off their current price.

4k is where is should be. This imaginary money in housing and stocks has made the Western world live WELL beyond its means. I'm hoping for and bracing for 4000.

No, 20k is where it should be. 50k is where it should be. if 4k is where it happens to be, then i will be somewhere else! Hmmm where could i go... not canada, not mexico, nowhere near the smug europeans, stay away from the ruskies, asia is to third worldy, so is africa, south america is to much like mexico, the middle east is to terroristy.... Well i guess i just hope that the dow doenst fall that low.

New Zealand of course, although maybe too hobbitty?

Hey dragon
Australia of course if you cannot stand the heat then go across the ditch(NEW ZEALAND)

Close Friday
7,223.98 and raising

Hmmm. austrialia is still good. Austrialia it is!

Good one dragon tell me when you arrive

Im here! Wheres the kangeroos?

will send you some look down any old side street
there i was looking forward to meeting u
did you bring diesel?

Diesel is right here. Unfortunetly he ahd to be sedated before going on the plane so he is out. They didnt want him causing trouble among the passengers. Plus our pilot was a woman so i didnt want to get her angry.

i just woke up. where am i? how did i get here? what are dragon and curios doing here? must be a dream..i'm going back to sleep. zzzzzzzzz

I figure ill keep him like this until we get back to the USA. No sense scaring the australians right? Now you were saying something about kangeroos?

what was he air sick or p...sd hope he has no drugs on him he will end up inside.

just keep your eye on him, he might just be a big brown (roo)not a (snake)or a (four x BEER) he hops around

Im sorry waht? Your accent is to thick i cant understand you.

Dragon, what are you talking about with the dow belonging at 20k? Have you looked at corporate earnings lately? There's not a company in the dow that's deserving of a price that would yield a 20k at a reasonable PE. Add to that the threat of deflation and the dow is in the neighborhood where it belongs. This is a bear market rally and nothing else. We'll see sub-6500 and if the bad news continues, we just might see rob's 4k.

"Prices of crude goods (mostly commodities) fell for the seventh straight month, down 4.5%.
Prices of intermediate goods (which are partially processed goods) fell for the seventh straight month, down 0.9%.
Prices of core intermediate goods fell 0.6% in February and are now down 0.1% in the past year, the time they've been negative since 2002. As recently as last summer, core intermediate prices were rising at a 12% pace.
Falling prices are most apparent for industrial materials.
Over the past six months, farm product prices have fallen at a 35% annual rate. Chemical prices are falling at a 25% rate. Metals prices have fallen at a 38% rate, including an 80% annualized drop in copper scrap prices.
Commodity prices are ruled by the forces of global supply and demand, so their path will be determined largely by how deep the global slump turns out to be and how quickly it turns."

When do you see Alcoa back over $10? What about Dow Chemical? When do you see GE back into the $30s? Need we mention GM? American industry is hurting and until the banking sector is back on stable ground and consumer confidence returns, the dow will stay under 10k. After that, once the economy heats back up, we're going to be threatened by hyperinflation and peak oil to put a damper on things all over again. The good times are over. Our best days are behind us.

The losses this year for the dogs of the dow could actually be greater than the total earnings of the rest. That doesn't take into account the huge fall in asset values of real estate rich companies like McDonalds. There is no way we are just going to get back to "business as usual" in the near future. At the moment we don't even know where we are or how we got there. Kinda like waking up after what must have been one helluva party.

Bayoubear - My wife is extremely miffed that you removed her picture from this question. Times are hard, can't we have just a little fun?

Wasn't so worried about 'times' being hard.....


plus I didn't remove anything...I like a little variety

Yesterday the Government printed another 1 TRILLION dollars out of thin air. That's why Gold shot up.

Didn't even hear about it did you?

Tomorrow Obama officially receives some very bad news. The market may see a tumble...

of course we can always just *Hope* not. That was the party platform. Let's just *Hope* the dow is at 20k sometime soon.

@frogchop, come on, dont be ignorant. The american economy , to put it into the best possible quote i can say "Is Fundemantly strong" (john McCain). Our economy has a core that is stronger than titanium. During the bubble heres just a few of the things on that list that are still above what they were 8 years ago:
Commodities rose 24% during the boom years and now they have dropped 4.5%. They are still high. Dont be so easily swayed by the media. If they were lower that would be a good thing because it would cost consumers less.
Price for partially proccessed goods were going down for years thanks to countries like china who can manufacture things by the truck load. If they were rising then that would be a bad thing but since they are falling that is good for the people who need to buy things.
For core intermediate goods im not sure where you got that number that they were rising by 12%, i guess it really depends on which individual product you are looking at but as a whole those to have been fluctuating down wards over the past couple years. Once again, the media loves to turn something as simple as a stock market fluctuation into a nation wide panic. Never, ever, ever, will the stock market go to the 4k level.
And yes GM is doing badly but for every failure there is a success. GM is doing badly so that is a trade off for companies like citibank which recently rose up by 300% then dropped and ended today and a 250% increase from what it was before.

@dragon,
maybe, reading robas comment, you were right about the "printing the money". yes, they are "printing" the money... let's see what the result will be ...

Technically they arent "printing the money" because these days they just say there is a couple billion in a bank account and it appears.

@ Dragon: Ahhhh, so Citigroup is a success because it rose 300%. Have you bothered to look at the two year chart on C? http://www.miniurl.com/8500

Sorry, but even I could boast of a profit when the government just handed me another $360 billion last week. You are citing falling prices as a good thing for consumers may be right, but it's atrocious for corporate profits. Stock prices are based on profits. If they have to cut prices, they're cutting profit. But this is just the tip of the iceberg for thie economy right now. Until you fully understand the risk in CDS's, you don't understand the bomb, or as Warren Buffet put it, the "financial weapons of mass destruction" that is set to go off. Why do you think the government had to step in and take over AIG and is now dumping in hundreds of billions to keep it alive? It comes down to the over $1.5 trillion in CDS risk that they hold. If they failed, nearly every bank in the world would have collapsed in a matter of days.

We live in a financial house of cards. I don't want to steal your illusions if they keep you happy, but the reality is way scarier than you can even dream. If you really consider yourself open minded to learning about reality, just upload this podcast into your i-pod and take a listen: http://www.miniurl.com/8501 It's a credible source, it's well researched, and easy enough for anyone to understand.

While I don't know if I share the doom of a dow 4000, I also wouldn't rule it out. I certainly know better than to think that this is anything but a bear market rally. We'll be back to 6500 and below. I have no crystal ball, so I can't say by when, but it won't be long. Two weeks of gain don't mean the dow is back. Something will trigger the next big drop and none of us know what. Maybe it will be the new unemployment numbers, maybe the new home foreclosure numbers, maybe it will be a spike in the price of oil, but brace for impact. It's going to be a hell of a ride.

Terence Corcoran: Is this the end of America?

Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Published: Friday, March 20, 2009
Helicopter Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late-night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U. S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world -- from China to Chicago and Chihuahua -- watches, the circus-like U. S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U. S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It's happened many times before, except for once, when it took 20 years to rise out of the Great Depression.

Past success, however, is no guarantee of future recovery, especially now when there are daily disasters and new indicators of political breakdown. All developments are not disasters in themselves. The AIG bonus firestorm is a diversion from real issues , but it puts the ghastly political classes who make U. S. law on display for what they are: ageing self-serving demagogues who have spent decades warping the U. S. political system for their own ends. We see the system up close, law-making that is riddled with slap-dash, incompetence and gamesmanship.

One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with Congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.

But America is at risk in other ways, especially in the technical business of setting and executing policy. The presidency of Barack Obama has set out on a course that has no precedent in U. S. history. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal transformed the U. S. economy during the Great Depression, pushed America off on a sharply different political and ideological course. The Obama administration is different in many ways, not least in its supreme self-confidence in its methods and objectives.

Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation -- every nook and cranny of the U. S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U. S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U. S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.
The spillover effect of all this on the rest of the world promises to be dramatically disruptive. The greatest global risk is in monetary and currency policy. Below is a chart that graphically demonstrates the sharp deviation in monetary policy from past norms. Under the chairmanship of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve is in the midst of a giant economic experiment, flooding the world with U. S. dollars, hoping that flood will stimulate economic activity.

The total monetary base, already at astronomical levels, is now expected to take another big hit with the new Fed policy of buying up U. S. longer-term treasury bills in a bid to drive down long-term interest rates.

Mr. Bernanke is sometimes known as "Helicopter Ben" because he once in an academic paper referred to the use of "helicopters" full of money to rescue an economy from deflation. In comments Wednesday to explain the Fed's new policy of buying $300-billion in U. S. treasury bills, Mr. Bernanke noted that the Fed is now more worried about inflation being too low than about it getting too high in the future.

For the rest of the world, however, the worry is that America is at risk of becoming the fountainhead of a new inflationary outburst. The U. S. dollar is now in decline, gold is moving sharply higher, and new global currency turmoil is on the horizon.

It may not happen. A paper just published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, source of the chart below, says that the Fed will have to be prepared to absorb all the excess money it has poured into the U. S. economy. It will be a technical and political challenge unlike any central bank has ever undertaken. The future of America is at stake.

How anyone can say that the economy is fundamentally strong at this point is beyond me. They're obviously not reading the same reports, talking to the same people, and watching the same stock market as the rest of us. I can very honestly say that this is the worst I've ever seen things. I'm seeing pain in all strata of society, from the struggling charity organizations and jobless families, to the private schools making cuts. To top it off, we have Obama's "fix", which is smoke and mirrors, stealing from Peter to pay Susan, and as the commodities markets are starting to confirm, will create massive inflation down the road. Anyone who's taken undergrad economics should be able to figure that out.

Of course, the market and the economy are 2 different subjects. The best rallies start in the midst of the worst economic news.

I think the problem is defining what the "fundamentals" are exactly.

We certainly have the essentials. We have the workers, we have the private sector. The question is whether or not we have a path for the workers to find the employees and vice versa.

It was regulation that got us into the housing mess, and I doubt that it will be more government (more regulation) that gets us out of it.

Printing more money and deciding arbitrarily where it should be directed certainly doesn't scream "fundamental" in the sense of a free market.

Undergrad econ is a wonderful way to get some basic knowledge. It's a shame economic education starts so late. I wonder how much better informed our public would be if econ classes were to start in high school or even elementary grades.

@ # 41 ... Extremely well said.

@valornhonor. #41 didn't say it, just cut and pasted it. World of difference.

I certainly hope somethign in there was well said considering how much WAS said! I stopped reading after word 4.

quite the rally today!

any reason why this has not settled or suspended yet?

pay day gang it closed at 7775.86 i do believe thats more than 7500.whut whut

Probably has something to do with the server problems they were having earlier.

Been trying to set up the new version of this question but there seems to be a bug in the system.

Yep - sorry still having a few problems with the site, so bear with us ...

tisha - i would love to bear with you. or is that "bare?" either way as long as its with you i'm sure it will be enjoyable. :O)

haha, i've never seen 100%

As Tisha said a while back....still having some problems so I'll get to settlement as soon as the system allows and I can access it.....thanks for the patience!!!!

was wondering why this didn't pay out....I want my money.... LOL!

I've tried settling some of the questions, and although it seems to go through on my end, the pages are still not loading up properly...I also can't recreate any questions yet

Thanks for everyone who bore/boar with us...looks like everything is running smoothly once again. Here's a response I posted to the forum http://www.hubdub.com/e/Topic/Cant_create_a_new_question_442

"It appears that everything is fixed now! This includes flags and settlement requests, question creation, and being able to see settled questions. Do let us know if there are lingering problems.

For questions that were settled when the site was partially broken, you would not have got an email request saying whether you won or lost, and the action may not have been properly recorded on My Hubdub, so the best way to check your winnings is to look at My Predictions on the market page itself."