[billethkid]

What a day it was…
1. Wall Street extended recent gains, driving the S&P 500 above 900 and allowing the index to wipe out its loss for the year.
2. Better-than-expected economic reports and positive analyst comments were the catalysts for the advance.
3. March pending home sales posted their first back-to-back increase in almost a year, while construction spending ended a sixth month slide.
4. Commodity producers rallied as China’s manufacturing expanded for the first time in nine months and the price of oil hit a five-week high.
5. Intel led the technology group higher following an analyst upgrade. The shares rose 82 cents to 16.66.
6. Financial stocks rose as the market anticipated banks have avoided the worst case scenario.
7. Bank of America denied a report it was trying to raise $10 billion and shares closed up 1.68 at 10.38.
8. On the earnings front, Sprint Nextel reported a surprise profit and the shares jumped 33 cents to 5.00.
9. The Dow closed up 214.33 points at 8426.74.
NYSE volume totaled over 1.7 billion shares.
10. The S&P 500 was up 29.72 points.
11. The Nasdaq gained 44.4.
12. Advancing issues beat decliners by 5-1 on the NYSE and by 7-2 on the Nasdaq.
13. The 10-year Treasury note was steady to yield 3.16%.

And not one political inference.......how refreshing!!!!

BTK

[Villages Kahuna]

You're right, Billie. I'm keeping my fingers (and toes) crossed, but all the pundits seem to be saying that our economy has "bottomed out" and that the stock market is a leading indicator of economic recovery.

Whatever steps taken seem to be working and I think everyone should be glad for that. There were all kinds of differences of opinion regarding what actions by the government were appropriate and might be effective, but it seems that few people thought that the critical economic problems could be solved without any government intervention.

It'll be a balancing act to make sure that the recovery continues on an upward slope, but the next objective seems to be for the U.S. to begin to cut and/or reallocate spending in order to begin to reduce the annual deficit and begin to whittle away at the national debt. A winding down of defense spending paralleling that of combat operations should help, as will some simple belt-tightening across-the-board. Maybe there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

We're going to get some "assistance" from the countries which have been buying our debt, for sure. The number of countries now participating in the bi-weekly auction of Fed paper has declined from 43 to 20. And China has again told the Fed that they should not be relied upon to increase the amount of U.S. debt that they hold. We've pretty much reached the limit of our borrowing capacity.

All we can hope for is the political will to accomplish these objectives. What's encouraging, I think, is that we have not been wanting for both the creativity and political will to face down the short-term economic crisis. We can only hope that the same political will can be re-sighted on the longer term problems.

[SteveZ]

All of this emphasis on the stock market is fascinating. It sees so simple.

When one looks at how the stock market operates, it's the ultimate gambling hall. Buyers buy with the hope (gamble) that someone else will buy later at a higher rate, and soon. As long as this upward spiral (gamble) goes on, everyone sings a happy song. If the next-level buyers don't buy at the ever-increasing price, the bottom falls out. When the market gets hurt the worst is when buyers buy (gamble) with borrowed funds.

Las Vegas is actually kinder, as there is no false image as to what's occurring.

So, when gamblers stop buying stocks because they don't like the odds of winning, the "financial world" collapses.

So, in order to save the nation and the world, we need to gamble more and save less. What a life!

[dklassen]

I think what were seeing doesn't have a thing to do with what the government has done. It's more in spite of it. We've come out of recessions before and it didn't take trillions to do it.

What's going to happen when hyper-inflation hits and it's time to repay the trillion a year in interest? We're living in a house of cards and you can only spend them so high before they come crashing down.