Stock Market Report 1/30/12: No Confidence

News broke today right on the Stock Market that indicates that investor confidence may be shaky. The stock market has had its highs and lows, but it appears that the trust of long term earnings is not something that is rather trusted. On today’s Stock Market Report for January 30^th 2012.

Stock Market Report January 30^th 2012:  Losses Low but Values Not Strong

Five decades is a long time. A lot of scientific advances can happen in five decades. A lot can happen in five years. Still five decades ago, when Richard Nixon was President, was the last time equities was valued at such a low point.

The fact of the matter was that the stock market is something that is going to be turbulent even on the best days. It is a fact that needs to be hammered right home time and time again. The economy is very much the same day. Investing in anything will seem like a calculated risk. One that can pay off, but people live and die by what is occurring on Wall Street and what news is coming out.

Trust in a market takes years and years, even decades of good will to really build, but it takes only a couple of years of a bad economy to shatter. And depending on when you count the slump as starting, the last five or six years has not been rather kind. The middle class has suffered the most, what’s left of it anyway, and there is not that much of the middle class.

Banks are on shaky ground, housing is on shakier ground, and the government does not have a magic rabbit to pull out of their hat. 2012 had some cautious optimism with how the economy would go but with each piece of news, there are some rather damning figures. It seems like the United States cannot spin the numbers to be a sign of good.

Yet do we have a savior? Do we have a white knight? Anyone who knows anything about investing knows that you need to get in early on the ground floor, with the stocks that have the good dividends. But the elevator from the ground floor is not as high as it was in previous years.

This is a rather tough recession, flirting dangerously with a depression at times, and it remains to be seen where the lessons of this economic slump will be learned. Sadly more often than not those are doomed to repeat history due to their inability to learn from it.

Dow Jones: 12,653.72(-6.76)

Nasdaq: 2,811.94(-4.61)

S and P 500: 1,302.02(-3.31)