DOW Breaks 9,000!

Now, don't get too excited. There is usually an end-of-year rally, fueled in part by the fact that most of those on Wall Street on are vacation/out shopping their resumes/both. Still, it is nice to see a little bit of bounce, and with luck, we can see some stabilization in the markets that will let rebuilding occur.

Mind you, as much as a cynic I was when the markets were high, I find myself an optimist now that things are getting a bit ragged around the corners. I could write this off to my own counterfactual mulishness, but in this case it may be that I stayed in place while everything swerved around me. I doubted the sunniness of the golden promises years ago, and I am similarly leery of the ultimate end-of-the-economic world predictions now in the press.

Mind you, things are still dire, and we are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. Things will get worse in a lot of different parts of the business world, in part because the same people who got us into this mess still have their fingers wrapped around the mechanisms of recovery. But I've got hope, and look forward to a year where, at best, things are about this cruddy at the end of year and no worse.

Yeah, I'm such a sunny person.

More later,

Rainfall at Grubbstreet since December 1: 1.25 inches (and about 15 inches of snow that didn't get into the rain gauge).

Update: Not to make anyone feel better, but I tried to go shopping at the local big mall down in Tukwilla Saturday, and gave up when I couldn't find any parking. This mall has been revised with parking structures, and despite (or rather because of) staff trying to direct traffic, it was a complete mess. Not that this is an indication of larger trends (much of it may be that this would be the first weekend some people felt comfortable leaving their houses), but it evokes Yogi Berra's famous line "No one goes there anymore - it's too crowded")