Anytime...check this out, i can just see the bulls rolling their eyes<gg>
1930: "In January, February, and March of 1930 the stock market showed a substantial recovery. Then in April the recovery lost momentum, and in June there was another large drop" (John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929, London: Penguin Books, 1992, p.160).
"On June 2 an investment company published a full-page ad in Time with a bold headline asking, "Will Stocks Break Their November Lows?" That same day stocks began a slide...
"Sentiment rules the market, and its is about as low as it has been in a number of months," admitted the Wall Street Journal. "Ask any broker, and he will tell you that the main reason for the market’s weakness is the failure of business to improve as predicted." With steel and automotive production, construction, and railway traffic all down, "Wall Street resigned itself to a series of poor earnings statements for the second quarter." Few signs of cheer penetrated the gloom. "What the country needs at present," said the Journal, "is one good ‘break’ of luck, according to some Wall Street diagnosticians." The best break, the sources added, would be "defeat of the pending tariff bill in the Senate."
"By the end of June no glimmer of change was in sight. The market [had] continued its downward course... The New York Reserve Bank had tried to stem the tide on June 19 with still another rate cut to an unprecedented 2½ percent, but the move proved wholly ineffective. Hundreds of stocks stood at new lows for the year, many of them at levels comparable to their November 1929 bottoms...
"When the Market collapsed, Alexander Noyes [financial columnist of the New York Times] happened to be aboard a ship heading for England with a number of financial men going on vacation... [When informed by dispatches of the selloff] "Everyone realized at once," Noyes recalled, "that the market’s previous recovery had been fallacious, that reaction and depression, instead of being ended, had in reality only begun..." (Maury Klein, Rainbow's End: the Crash of 1929, new York: OUP, 2001, pp.270-72).
"But presently Mr [Henry] Ford had to discharge many thousands of his men and later to lower his wage rates; and, despite all the efforts of cities, states, and the Federal government, the upturns [in certain economic indicators] were promptly ended. Quite possibly the subsequent downswing was accelerated by way of reaction to falsified hopes" (Irving Fisher, Booms and Depressions, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933, p.100).
2002: "US stocks tumbled on Friday, moving the main market indices closer to their September lows as stocks fell for the fifth straight week. Trading was volatile because of "triple witching", the expiration of stock options, index options and futures contracts.
"Negative sentiment continued to weigh on the market. "The gloom and doom out there is so thick you can cut it with a knife," said Peter Cardillo, president and chief strategist at Global Partner Securities. "The scenario here is one of testing and re-testing the low end of the trading range, and it'll be key whether or not the Nasdaq holds these lows" (Mary Chung & Andrew Postelnicu, Wall St concludes fifth straight losing week, ft.com, June 21, 2002).
"...said Brian Pears, head of equity trading at Victory Capital Management. "We need one big catalyst that says, 'Hey, the economy is really doing better' ... We need better earnings news also. We already have a good economy" (Chelsea Emery, Stocks Tumble to New Lows for the Year, reuters.com, June 20, 2002).
(FW compares the low on November 13, 1929 with the low on September 21, 2001).
"Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Officer William clay Ford Jr. [the great-grandson of Henry Ford] said the second-largest automaker will cut 35,000 jobs, close five factories and eliminate four models after its first annual loss in nine years" (Bill Koenig & Alison Fitzergerald, Ford to close Plants, Cut 35,000 Jobs to Stem Losses, bloomberg.com, January 11, 2002).
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