Gloomy Recession Talk Tosses Wall Street into Further Freefall

Despite the naive exuberance exhibited in some quarters after Monday's stock surge, Wall Street is still armaggedon it! The sucker went down dramatically today amidst gloomy talk about the economy foundering in a recession. At the close, the Dow was down about 735 points, or 7.9 percent, negating most of Monday’s 936-point gain. And the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 9 percent. Patting himself on the back for his prescience, bond market analyst Tony Crescenzi told clients, "I've said since the summer that a ‘dark period’ of economic data lie ahead." The darkness! Our only hope now is that brave Bilbo Bernanke can deliver Sauron Greenspan's evil ring to the floor of the stock exchange and let Gandalf Krugman destroy it once and for all.