"Basically, It's a Disaster"

By Bernhard Warner Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - 3:54am

Today's Business Press

More than a decade's worth of gains have now been wiped out. The Dow on Monday sunk to a low last plumbed in the Clinton-Gore years in what BusinessWeek calls "the stock market's frightful slide." The blue-chip index is down to April 1997 levels, and the S&P 500 has lost half of its value since the start of 2008. For long-term investors, it all makes for grim accounting. "If you bought into the overall stock market—represented by the S&P 500—at any point in the last 11 years, your shares are now worth less than you paid for them," BusinessWeek writes. The Wall Street Journal points out that the latest downturn is particularly unsettling, as it's not just the banks pulling down the markets. Technology and commodity stocks like U.S. Steel have also fallen.