It is Thursday, the 16th of March. I'm David Brancaccio.
Economists like to warn that no one has repealed the business cycle.
But today on Wall Street it seemed as if someone had repealed the law of gravity. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 499 points. That is by far the most number of points ever added to that index in a single day. The gain of 4.9 percent is significant, but not in the top ten percentage gains. Nearly 1.5 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange today, a new record there as well.