Dow on Bill Clinton's last day in office: 10,587.59
Dow today: 10,365.4
That was your retirement. Seven years of it. Gone. Thanks to George Bush and John McCain. And if John McCain had his way, that would have been your Social Security money too. Gone. Seven years of growth, seven years of your life, wiped out.
Note from Joe: I'm monitoring CNBC. Looks like the final drop will be 777.68. MSNBC saying this is the largest number drop ever.
Wow. That's around almost 7%. From AP:
Wall Street has ended a stunning session with a huge loss, with the Dow Jones industrials plunging more than 660 points after the failure of the financial bailout plan in the House.Read that last sentence again. The credit markets are frozen. Banks aren't lending, even to other banks. This is why simply saying "too bad, no deal" is not a wise option, folks.
Stunned traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange watched on TV screens as the House voted down the plan. And they saw stock prices tumbling on their monitors.
The plan's failure means no one knows how the financial sector hobbled by hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage bets will recover. The credit markets remain close to frozen as banks are too afraid to lend — including loans to to other banks.
