These are the emotions that market participants are grappling with as they come to work this week. After a 214-point decline in the Dow Industrials last week, the consensus of the market seems to be the latter. We ll be watching.
Stock market speculators weren t the only ones taking it on the chin last week.
Typically, high-yield securities trade more with the economy than with interest rates because of the market s attention to the credit risk component. If the economy is growing at a healthy clip, one might conclude that the company s cash flow will look better, and it will experience less difficulty in servicing its debt. Not so, last week. The Dow at 5668 would indicate a genuine bear market. The worst U.S. market disaster of this century was the intermittent decline during the depression of the 1930s.