I certainly don't know if it will stay there, but the Dow just dropped under 9000. I just got back from a visit in Hoosierland, and things were grim there last week, they are grimmer now. GM a big employer, and a huge provider of insurance to the many, many thousands of retired workers intends to cut off insurance provision for its retired salaried workers at the first of the year. The giant RCA/Phillips picture tube plant in Marion In, once the largest in the world, and employer of me and Barney Smith in the 70's, is shut down and the whole county is much the poorer for it.
Crops are pretty good this year, they had about half the soybeans in when I left and were starting on the corn, but the number of people who directly work in agriculture is much less than it was in past decades so the benefits of a prosperous agriculture are not as significant as they once were-important, certainly, but not enough to make up for the awful catastrophe that has hit the state's manufacturing base.
Where will the fall of the market leave my old hoosier friends? I don't know for sure, and really who does, but even though they don't have much wealth, a large portion of what they do have is tied up in the market and it is vanishing. It is the collapse of the economy that makes plainest the awful price that Indiana has paid for its right-wing pattern of voting which has decimated the economy, crippled the Union movement and cost so many decent jobs in the name of some cultural war.
This isn't a particularly unique situation that Indiana finds itself in, most of the red states are the poorest states, and there is a cause and effect relationship there-but Indiana is the one I know, and truly love. I love its fields and streams, and the great fields of grain, I like its personally friendly genial people, who share with each other and give to charity. I like its little diners where one can go in and sit and drink pretty bad coffee and watch people who have known each other for decades interact as they come and go.
But I fear for them, with their eggs all in a basket that doesn't have much of a bottom. I hope that they vote for a change in the government-and I hope that they come to grips with the foolishness that has led them so far down a road that has led them to nowhere.
Update: I was optomistic, its now at 8648 and falling. A nice link is here
Update: 8579.19, 678.91, 7.33%
Update 2: some fluctuation, but down over 600 still though it made a slight run up into the -400's for a while.