Free Republic

Six months into a stock-market rally, Wall Street apparently saw more good news last week when a Labor Department report showed employment had jumped to 9.7 percent in August. Exactly why Friday's news -- joblessness at a 26-year high -- produced a 97-point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a good question, but if the stock market were perfectly predictable, we'd all be rich. Alas, we are all much poorer than we were two years ago. The Dow, which peaked above 14,000 points in October 2007, fell below 6,600 in early March -- a 53 percent decline in...