Today, December 23, 2008, was sunny, but cold and blustery. Crusty snow covered the landscape except for the roads and parking lots, where, though mostly cleared, treacherous icy patches lay in wait for a carelss pedestrian. Out shopping, for Christmas dinner, I stepped on a slick spot in a parking lot and took a heavy fall. I landed on my wallet which I carried it in my back pocket. It seemed fortunate at first, since the thick leather absorbed a good deal of the jarring shock. The hard, jagged ice would have hurt more. But the event seemed somehow prophetic when I looked at DOW averages at the end of the day.
On the last full trading day before Christmas, the DOW Jones Industrial Average fell a full 100 points. It handed investors a fifth straight day of loss, or about 1%, of its total, to end at 8419. The DOW has lost about 6% in the last five days of the 2008 Christmas Season and is down nearly 40% so far this year. If losses continue at this pace to the end of the year, the Average will have suffered its worst annual loss since 1931...and that was during the Great Depression.
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