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Given the steep daily declines in the stock market, it's a good time to point out the trove of economic data available to help assess the situation.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains a portal that allows users to easily drill down into thousands of economic data sets and provides tools for graphing and mapping it all on the fly. Called FRED, short for Federal Reserve Economic Data, the portal makes it pretty easy to access to the information you need in a variety of formats.
With just a few clicks, it's a snap to graph the daily movements of the stock market and get a sense of its lows and highs over time.
For instance, the loss of 634.76 points on Monday was the biggest loss since 2008, when huge losses were a fact of life. During 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 300 points or more on 24 different days of the year – the worst being Sept. 29, 2008, when the Dow plummeted 777.68 points, the biggest loss reflected in the Federal Reserve data.
So far this year, the Dow dropped 300 points or more on two occasions – Thursday, Aug. 4, (512.76 points) and Monday, Aug. 8 (634.76 points).
The charts below show the movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as well as the S&P 500 Index, from Aug. 8, 2007, through Aug. 8, 2011. It's a matter of a couple of clicks to change the date range and see those fluctuations going back to the 1950s for the S&P 500 and the 1800s for the Dow.
FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
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