For those of you concerned about the financial fallout of the failed bailout plan, and the “biggest single day drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average”, I thought I would share a little bit of research on the topic.
Monday’s (Sep 29, 2008) 777.68 point drop was the biggest numeric drop in the history, but it isn’t anywhere near the biggest single-day percentage drop, which is much more significant and investment is made by percentage instead of plain numeric value. This drop was 6.98%, 18th on the list of highest percentage drops.
Historical Losses:
The number one drop was 24.39% on December 12, 1914, the first day the market was open after the start of World War I. On October 12, 1987, the market declined by 22.61%, and the two-day stock market crash of 1929 saw consecutive 12.82% and 11.73% declines, ushering in the Great Depression. September 11, 2001 is far down at number 15, with only a 7.13% loss.
Due to the effects of percentage changes in general upward trends, the DJIA increased from 54 points after the 1914 crash, to 230 in 1929 and 1,739 in 1987, to today’s 10,850. In essence, the 777.68-point drop was only 7%, but the number was far bigger than the entire DJIA total of 1914 or 1929. Had those years lost 100% of financial value, it wouldn’t have come close to the recent numeric total, but it would have been far more serious (and was, at 20+%), destroying the financial circumstances of most people invested in the stock market.
Also take note: the DJIA increased by nearly 500 points the next day (Sep 30), salvaging much of the losses.
Also note that if the stock market drops more than 10%, trading is halted automatically (due to the 1987 crash), and this did not nearly come to pass in the recent drop. Our country is really relatively financially sound relative to past national crises.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_in_the_Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb
Whether or not you like cats, it seems to me evident that cats really aren’t particularly curious. Kittens, perhaps, display a bit of curiosity, but cats as a rule seem to loaf about with very little interest in the world about them, so long as it feeds them and treats them as royalty.
Now, as everybody knows, curiosity killed the cat. If this were true, it would imply that cats have a level of curiosity that is more lethal than that in other animals. After all, we don’t say “curiosity killed the dog/penguin/caterpillar”, so evidently curiosity must not be so dangerous to other creatures, or other creatures simply aren’t as curious. Given, the convenient alliteration with (c)uriosity, (k)illed, and (c)at, the ease of monosyllabic names, and the general popularity of cats might lend them a proverbial advantage over the non-alliterative, but more popular, dog and the less popular, alliterative, polysyllabic caterpillar, but I digress.
Why, then, do modern-day cats seem often to lack even the slightest forms of curiosity, despite the apparent past prevalence that resulted in the coining of such a phrase? If the proverb were true, there should be less cats in the world (which those misailurists and ailurophobes among you would applaud), due to a feline tendency towards fatal curiosity.
In the end it seems the proverb, as Miss Mable Godfrey’s unfortunate Blackie can attest, has runs its course. Curious cats find themselves killed, leaving their less curious brethren to sustain the species, resulting in progressively less curious generations of cats. And so we are stuck with two seemingly contradictory things: the proverb “curiosity killed the cat” and cats that are not in the least bit curious.
For those who were curious, and everybody else, too.
Standard Myers-Briggs (ignore the “programmers” label; it’s irrelevant)
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/mb/default.asp
Functions Test (especially for people with close numbers on the first test)
http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/assessment/develop_old.html
It’ll take time to think, but it’s highly recommended. Both websites (and the cognitiveprocesses.com website) provide lots of detailed information to help understand your results. You should also post your results here, if possible, to share with the rest of us! Andrew and I can also help interpret results.
