Roller Coaster Ride

I don’t know if we are at the bottom of the roller coaster looking up or at the top of the roller coaster looking down! On May 6, 2010 we had the largest one day drop on the DOW ever in history. The Dow fell over 900 points before recovering and finishing at -347.


I had been feeling pretty good lately. We have seen an “up-tick” in business. It seems as if more businesses are opening around town, and there is less office space sitting vacant. Until last week, the Dow had been slowly rising. The direction we were headed appeared to be “up”.

“PIGS” is a new acronym that I have learned to dislike. It stands for Portugal, Italy (sometime Ireland), Greece and Spain. Just before the DOW dropped so badly and diverted my attention, I had been following the riots in Greece as the EuroBank was imposing limits on the Greek economy. Greece is bankrupt, but apparently lots of people were not happy about the austerity measures.

And now the UK government (United Kingdom-England) is having its own problems. No one party won a majority in the recent election so the parties all have to get together and bargain to try to form an amalgamation of parties that will somehow equal a majority of seats in the Parliament…or to be precise, a majority in the House of Commons. Commentators say that it may take a month or so for a leader to form a government. Sounds like the USA Presidential Election 2000, doesn’t’ it?

So after all the excitement with the Dow, the Labor Department reported that we gained 280,00 jobs last month. It was also noted that the gains were “across the board”, i.e., in many different parts of the economy.

So what’s next? I don’t know, but I do like what Benjamin Franklin said at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence… “We must all hang together or we’ll surely all hang separately.” We’re in this together…whatever this is.

Monday, May 10th, the DOW was up over 400 points. Did I mention the roller coaster?

Hoping to see you at a closing real soon -