How low stocks can go

Look out below, said Jonathan Berr in BloggingStocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 10,000 on Monday for the first time since 2004. Now that the Dow has fallen below that “once unthinkable benchmark,” it’s anybody’s guess how low the market can go.

The bigger question, said Justin Fox in Time online, is, “What makes it all stop?” Maybe the whole nightmare will end in “a whimper” once “everybody gets more or less equally pessimistic.” Or maybe “some dramatic display of global coordinated government action will do the trick.”

That might not work, said Floyd Norris in The New York Times online, but that won’t stop the world’s mightiest central banks from giving it a try. So look for the Federal Reserve and its overseas counterparts to “swing into action with the move they know best—cutting interest rates.” And Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson might try to help by spending “that $700 billion bailout as fast as he can.”

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Don’t expect some financial hero to save us, said Daniel Gross in Slate. J.P. Morgan almost single-handedly stopped the panic of 1907 by bailing out failing trust companies and saving brokerage firms. Today, when “his modern-day imitators look at a chaotic, interconnected global economy, all they can do is play whack-a-mole.”