The Dow Jones is less than 1000 points from it's ALL TIME high in history.

[MadHound]

18. And what does that number signify?

It certainly isn't a reliable indicator of how the economy as a whole is doing. Rather, it is only a measure how those thirty corporations are doing. And what is good for those corporations isn't necessarily good for the rest of us. Regularly we see the stock price of a Dow listing go up because they just laid off a few hundred, or thousand, employees. Thus their costs drop and their profits rise. But such unemployment isn't good for the overall economy.

To a lesser extent, such an uptick is an indicator of how the richest ten percent of our population is doing. The richest ten percent own eighty five percent of the stocks in this country, the richest one percent own half the stocks in this country. Thus, stock prices effect them a great deal, but the rest of us, not so much.

Thus, judging the economic health of the country by using the Dow numbers is a sucker's move. The connection between the health of the economy and the health of the Dow is tenuous at best, and most of the time there is no connection at all.