Squeezing through ...
U.S. stocks fell Tuesday, with the major indexes headed to their lowest close in more than five years, after a gauge of home building sank, erasing optimism that came as retailer Home Depot Inc. reported better-than-anticipated results.
"My personal bottom line is however the dream or nightmare ends, we're not close to the end yet," said Linda Duessel, equity market strategist at Federated Investors.
After shifting between positive and negative territory, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 154.28 points to 8,119.3, putting the blue-chip index on pace to its lowest finish since April 1, 2003.
MarketWatch | U.S. stocks fall, on track to close at five-year lows
Not quite but, at 2:50PM, it looked to be a close-run thing ...
Not that a surge to 8,425 is too difficult to fix in a low-volume market so volatile reporters should know better than to file a story an hour before the close.
OK, the pretense passing for market forces — bearing only a passing likeness to reality, is set for a fall. Lows have been tested and retested and they look anything but difficult to break. (How is it that the market rallies on HP's lowered expectations but ignores some of the most dire reports ever to leave the statisticians' desks?)
It certainly won't require GM going bust to break the already broken back of our global economy and, as Barack Obama leads his merry band of Clintonistas into the corridors of power, he'd do well to listen to Republican Mitt Romney.
GM CEO Rick Wagoner can bleat all he likes, but common sense is stacked against him and the dying city of Detroit. What is it with these people? The U.S. economy has already undergone "... a catastrophic collapse ..." yet US$4.2845 trillion has been spent trying to pretend it didn't happen. That's over and above the US$32 trillion erased from the value of global equities this year.
It's money that — if it existed, might have been put to far better use.
America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.
Mike Davis | Why Obama's Futurama Can Wait
