Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

The stock market is currently a giant mess right now.  We saw a 600+ point drop yesterday in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to put it below 9,000 points for the first time since 2003.  You would think hey it’s got to bottom out sometime right?  The Dow took close to a 700 point plunge right after the market opened this morning putting the Dow below 8,000 points.  I can remember not to long ago when the Dow had surpassed 12,000 points for the first time.  This is a massive downturn in the market. 

If you recall from a post earlier this week talking about how the Dow has dropped below 10,000 points this week for the first time since 2004.  It has lost nearly 2,000 more points all in the same week.  Investors have pulled out nearly $50 billion in investments just in the past week alone and they have not invested it elsewhere.  How bad is this going to get before it gets better?  The Federal Reserve made an emergency cut to key interest rates dropping them down to 1.5%.  The government is trying to prevent a recession here, but it doesn’t look like it can be stopped.  Economists yesterday stated that the chance we will be in a recession by next year is now around 80% up from around 60%.  Some economists say we have already hit recession.  The bad part is that this is most likely going to be a consumer led recession. 

So what does this mean for people like you and me?  Well that question depends on lots of factors.  Do you currently have investments in the stock market?  Do you have a retirement account, and if so where are all your funds sitting?  How secure is your job?  Will you be able to keep working or are you in an industry that could be affected by job losses.  All these questions are really scary actually.  It has been said that there has been over 2 trillion dollars lost from people’s retirement accounts already since the credit crisis hit.  The unemployment rate is hovering around 7% right now.  Some good news is that economists say that the unemployment rate won’t even come close to the 25% rate it was at during the great depression.  Economists say that it should top out at around 10%.  Lets hope that the bleeding can stop now and no more workers will lose there jobs and those that have lost jobs will be able to find work again.

I am looking forward to the day that all this mess finally hits bottom and our economy starts to make a recovery.  We all should know that the economy has to keep getting worse before it can get better.  It will turn around though and it will get better and our economy will be that much stronger after all this is said and done.  Sometimes people can’t learn without making mistakes to learn from.  Let’s hope everyone involved here can learn from the mistakes that have been made and can become stronger from it.