Yahoo: Dow closes below 10,000 for first time in 3 months

[MoneyDrone]

Read the rest here.

NEW YORK—The Dow Jones industrial average closed below 10,000 for the first time in three months Monday on nagging concerns about debt loads in Europe.

Shares of big banks pulled the market lower, extending a slump that has led to four straight weekly losses.

Rising deficits in weaker European economies including Greece, Portugal and Spain have raised questions about the health of the global financial system.

Greece's finance minister said Monday the government is preparing to boost some taxes to shore up its finances. But civil servants opposed to cutbacks have pledged to strike on Wednesday.

[Xena]

Swell.

[webhead]

Republicans are opposing financial regulations.

The CEO who spent $1.2 million on his office decorations has been hired by CIT as its new CEO.

When an original NFL team wins the Super Bowl, 75% of the time stocks increase in the year following the game. New Orleans is not an original NFL team.

Republicans are offering health care ideas again, some of which have been included in the Senate bill that passed without one single Republican vote.

Unemployment is still a negative number, albeit a number that show employment riding. Yet the Republicans will not acknowledge increases in the employment numbers.

The DOW is passing the 10,000 mark - on its way down to ?,???

[webhead]

excerpt:

Overhaul’s Failure Will Ignite U.S. Health Mergers (Update2)
Bloomberg.com
By Alex Nussbaum and Meg Tirrell

Feb. 8

Political Dynamic

Brown’s victory deprived congressional Democrats of their 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate needed to win passage of the health-care measure. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Managed Health Care Index has fallen 9.5 percent and the S&P 500 Pharmaceutical Index has dropped 7.6 percent since then, compared with the S&P 500’s 8.1 percent decline. That follows a six-month period in which health stocks outperformed the S&P.

The drop is partly the result of uncertainty, said Les Funtleyder, a Miller Tabak & Co. health-care analyst in New York. Democrats have talked of passing stripped-down legislation that would ban insurers from denying coverage to people based on their health, while dropping a mandate in the current bills that more Americans buy their products.


much more to wrap you brain around here...

Get it? Since Brown was elected, the stock indices have fallen, mainly due to the uncertainty of whether or not there will be another 30 million customers for the insurance companies to make money from insurance premiums.

Brown = 41 vote majority in the Senate, ya know!