Dow dives 800 points, recovers nearly 440 points

Seattle News.Net
Monday 6th October, 2008

Unsurprisingly Wall Street was sharply lower Monday.

Beset by doom and gloom surrounding global credit markets, and diving stock markets from Tokyo to London, Wall Street was never going to be an exception to the day's events.

At the close of trading the Dow Jones industrials were down 363.35 points or 3.52% at 9,962.03 after being down 800 points earlier.

The Nasdaq Composite was off 84.43 points or 4.34% at 1,862.96.

The Standard and Poor's 500 was down 49.00 points or 4.46% at 1,050.23 just before the close.

Confidence evaporated from markets everywhere Monday as governments tried desperately to get credit markets back on track. Most analysts however say this will take time, and in the interim there is going to be a lot of pain.

The U.S. dollar rallied Monday on expectations that U.S. regulators had moved ahead of their counterparts in other countries in attempting to stabilise the financial system.

Not all though were complimentary of the U.S. government.

In a stinging editorial over the weekend, the respected UK finance journal The Financial Times took issue with the U.S. Congress's handling of the $700 billion bailout bill which was signed into law on Friday.

'The House of Representatives showed a catastrophic failure of leadership,' the editorial said. 'Monday's vote rejecting Hank Paulson's admittedly imperfect plan to add liquidity, transparency and perhaps a little capital to the banking system was shameful. It was a triumph over the needs of the nation,' said The Financial Times.

'The signal was that congressmen would rather save their seats than do what it takes to keep the US payments system functioning. The vote was reversed Friday but the message cannot be unsaid.'

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