"V" shaped recovery? More like an inverted "U" economic meltdown. I'm not an economist nor am I a fund manager so I have never looked at things like banking tech, capital flows, correlations between the prices that Wall Street and Hollywood hookers charge and the stock market, but there are more and more people on both left and right who are coming apart at the seams over the banking bailout, which to incompetent me, looks like a Wall Street protection racket combined with a banking system cover up by the usual suspects.
Economic contraction is the new black. There is no recovery from a $3 trillion Federal budget, with an even greater contraction in Federal revenue (h/t Instapundit).
What is astonishing is that there are still experts predicting when the recovery will occur at the end of the year, or next year, or in a few years. Barring a world war or another type of wake-up-call, cataclysmic event, there will be no recovery, only decline. This is the new normal.
The Crash of 1929: the Great Depression (Business Week):
The Crash of 1929: the Great Depression
Oct. 28, 1929
Dow’s Performance that year. -17.2%
On Oct. 28, 1929, The Wall Street Journal’s main headline read: ''Industrials off 38.33'' -- meaning the Dow had plunged 12.82%. The following day the average fell another 30.57 points, or 11.73%. The two-day rout marked the second- and third-largest percentage drops in the average’s history. In six days the industrial average lost more than 96 points, nearly 30% of its value. After hitting 300 on the last day of 1928, the Dow industrials would rally until peaking at 381.17 in September, only to crash the next month. It would not hit 300 again until 1954, 25 years later.
1Q 2009 (source: Financial Pragmatist):
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 13.3 percent, the S&P 500 slid 11.7 percent, and the Nasdaq fell 3.1 percent.
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