Selling Spree Sends Dow Below 10,000 Mark
Have we hit the bottom?
NPR-the $700 billion financial rescue plan is meant to restore investor confidence, so far it isn’t working. The Dow Jones industrial average at one point fell as much as 800 points on Monday before paring those losses by the end of the day.
The Dow ended down 369.88 points to 9,955.50 — the first time it has closed below the 10,000 mark in four years. Stocks in the U.S. have been down in the past four trading sessions.
FYI
Congress opens hearings on financial meltdown
from The Associated Press
NPR-The now-bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers arranged millions in bonuses for fired executives as it pleaded for a federal lifeline, lawmakers learned Monday, as Congress began investigating what went so wrong on Wall Street to prompt a $700 billion government bailout.
The first in a series of congressional hearings on the roots of the financial meltdown yielded few major revelations about Lehman’s collapse, and none about why government officials, as they scrambled to avert economic catastrophe, declined to rescue the flagging company while injecting tens of billions of dollars into others.
But it allowed lawmakers still smarting from a politically painful vote Friday for the largest federal market rescue in history to put a face on their outrage at corporate chieftains who took home hundreds of millions of dollars while betting on risky mortgage-backed investments that ultimately brought the financial system to its knees.
read more
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95430094
Oh yah!
A Congressional hearing should fix this mess.