1000 is your optimistic forecast? ebear, i hope you never turn pessimistic on us. what would have to happen for the dow to decline to 776; an asteroid hitting the earth?

Funny you should mention that. A miner friend of mine thinks that many of the large gold deposits were actually caused by asteroid strikes, which sort of fits with that neutron star theory Clavis posted a while back. If true, then a large gold bearing asteroid would not only crash the Dow, but would also knock the price of gold way down...heh.

I came across an idea the other day that would clean up this banking mess in a big hurry. It's too brilliant, so you know it will never happen, but the idea was to simply rebate the last 10 years of federal income tax to everyone who had paid those taxes. The amount returned would have to be applied to pay down any outstanding debts, such as mortgages, car loans, credit cards, etc, with any remaining balance spent as the recipient sees fit. People with no debts would receive the full amount to spend at their discretion. Obviously this is inflationary, since the amounts rebated would be have to be monetized, but that's happening anyway. This plan at least reduces debt at the individual level, plus gives people money to spend to get things moving again.

ebear