I'm almost at a loss to explain what occurred today, and I'm not talking about Woody offering extra french fries with my famous chicken tender dinner at lunch. In fact that would be harder to explain. What I'm referring to is the nuclear advance in stocks. I suppose since last week was the worst week EVER for stocks, no one had ever witnessed the Monday after such a happening. Now we know what it looks like! We really need to remember this day for the next time it happens in say...80 years. It now appears that the price low may be in place for what I believe is phase one of the entire decline. It was roughly 47% percent from high to low in the S&P at 840. I was hoping for a nice round 50% retracement like the 1929 decline but I'm afraid it's not in the cards. Now we turn our attention to this advance. This is very important because if this is similar to the 1929-1932 decline then the worst is ahead of us. It's after this advance that you'll need to be especially careful. In 1929 the market retraced 50% of the decline over several months before rolling over into the abyss. I know the Government is here to save us and all but has that ever really been a good thing? This government intervention is so far out of control now I'm afraid they've sown the final seeds of our destruction. The reason we're in this mess is because the Fed wanted to intervene anytime the destructive part of capitalism raised it's apparently unwanted, and certainly under appreciated head. It goes to what's been wrong with our entire political and, by extension, financial system for a long time now. No one can tell the public what they need to hear and survive long enough to help in any appreciable way. They'd be screamed down, ridiculed, laughed at and marginalized. Finally they'd be voted out of office. It's sort of like this...what kind of parent would you be if your kids got to vote on who mom and dad was? Would you be just as tough and risk losing what you loved most, or would you cave in again and again so as not to risk getting "voted out"? What we need is real leadership and quite frankly I don't see it anywhere. It's rather discouraging actually. It's far too late to get out of this mess without substantial pain, but the remedies offered are going to make it much, much worse. Western style capitalism is dying right before our eyes. Perhaps we can bury it in the grave Lazarus just ran out of.