Stock Market Suffers Record Losses Since Obama Victory

In the two days of trading on the NYSE since the presidential election, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has lost a record-breaking 929.49 points.  After the Dow closed at 9625.28 on Election Day, Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 Presidential Election just a few hours later.  The Dow responded by closing at 9139.27 (486.01 point loss) on Wednesday, then 8695.79 (443.48 point loss) on Thursday.  As of today, November 7, 2008, The Dow has not had a bigger two-day point loss in its 80-year history.

How does the percentage loss compare with historical losses?  It's almost as bad.  The 9.657% decline is the 13th worst in history and the worst since the market crash of Oct. '87.  In fact, as you can see below, excluding the week of Black Monday, the Dow's 2-day losses were the worst since the Great Depression.

	Date	2-day point change	2-day % change
1)	10/19/1987	-616.35	-26.171%
2)	10/29/1929	-71.15	-23.621%
3)	10/20/1987	-405.72	-18.058%
4)	11/6/1929	-41.38	-15.129%
5)	7/21/1933	-14.87	-14.356%
6)	10/28/1929	-38.83	-12.966%
7)	10/10/1932	-7.81	-11.783%
8)	7/20/1933	-12.41	-11.420%
9)	5/14/1940	-16.50	-11.397%
10)	11/12/1929	-26.79	-11.326%
11)	5/31/1932	-5.25	-10.502%
12)	11/13/1929	-21.70	-9.846%
13)	11/6/2008	-929.49	-9.657%

Source:  Yahoo! Finance

It's curious that the Obama supporters have been claiming that only Obama can "fix" the economy when the stock market, the backbone of the U.S. economy, is clearly preparing for the complete opposite.  I wish that only the Obama voters would get what they deserve, but unfortunately, as demonstrated on Wall Street this week, they're going to drag the rest of us down with them.

For all of you greedy baby-boomers out there that were so worried about your retirement savings under Bush and have been clamoring for "change"?  Don't come running to the rest of us to bail you out when your president of "change" wipes out the rest of your retirement by destroying confidence, taxing you up the wazoo, and saving Social Security by raiding your 401k's and IRA's!

Obama's election victory hasn't even been validated by Congress yet, and history is already looking poorly upon his administration.  In the 2012 election, when the GOP gets an easy victory over Obama, the only question will be which president did more damage to the U.S. economy:  Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter?