"Market Update"

Boy, am I ever glad the debt deal arranged by Obama and those patriotic Republicans served to inspire confidence. Is this REALLY what those "Tea Party Patriots" want?

Anyway, it looks more and more like Prof. Dr. Dr. Krugman has been right all along.

Oh yeah -- Welcome to The Great Depression - part II.

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Market Update

4:30 pm : Aggressive selling resumed today, causing the Dow to drop 500 points, the Nasdaq Composite to plummet 5%, and the S&P 500 to sink 60 points to 1200 for its worst single-session performance in more than two years.

Ongoing concerns about the global economy remained a driving force in today's sell-off, which was steady and orderly. Losses were ushered in with heavy share volume, and left the S&P 500 at its lowest level in nine months, or about 12% below its early May high.

Even safe havens like gold and silver failed to escape selling pressure as traders opted to sell their profitable picks in order to meet margin calls on other holdings. Gold settled lower by 0.5% at $1658.20 per ounce after it had rallied to a new all-time high at $1684.90 per ounce. Silver sank 5.6% to $39.42 after it had hit a three-month high of $42.30 per ounce.

The scope of this session's slide has many wondering what the market has in store tomorrow, when the official nonfarm payrolls report will be released. Today, though, participants were dealt a weekly initial jobless claims tally of 400,000, which isn't much better than the 405,000 initial claims that had been broadly expected among economists polled by Briefing.com.

Renewed macro tension in Europe prompted the European Central Bank President Trichet to provide markets with additional liquidity with an extension of maturities related to financing operations. In a similar vein, Japan expanded its asset purchase plan, but also intervened in the yen, which tumbled more than 3% against the greenback before it could pare some of that loss. Weakness in the yen and euro helped drive the Dollar Index 1.8% higher.