I was in for a surprise this morning when I checked My Yahoo, stocks tumbled, sitting at 11,565.04, lowest I’ve seen it in recent months.
Stocks tumbled Thursday as Wall Street contended with a barrage of bad news: another surge in oil prices and warnings of trouble in the key financial, automotive and high-tech industries. The major indexes showed losses of more than 1 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which shed more than 200 points and dropped to its lowest level of the year.
Guess Bernanke’s do nothing approach yesterday did less than nothing. Course the Fed is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to interest rates. We’ll see how it deals with this latest bit of news.
And not content with a little bad news, here’s more – oil is expected to go even higher, a lot higher.
OPEC President Chakib Khelil was quoted as telling a French television station that oil could rise as high as $170 per barrel this summer before pulling back. That and a falling dollar helped send light, sweet crude up $3.50 to $138.05 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Rising oil has saddled nearly all parts of the economy with higher costs, weighing on consumers who now have to reach much deeper into their wallets at the gas pump and therefore have less to spend elsewhere.
Gee, just what we wanted to hear. Not! Think I’ll go pet a cat, good stress relief.
Update for the curious from Reuters, not good at all.
The Dow Jones industrial average sank 358.41 points, or 3.03 percent, to end unofficially at 11,453.42.
There goes my retirement income.
