Last Friday was a real sign of the times. The market braced early Friday morning for a huge wipeout, so huge in fact, that a drop somewhere north of 1000 points would have stopped trading under emergency rules. The collective sighs of relief when the Dow only plunged 312.30 points, or 3.6 percent, could be heard in unison from all the TV Talking Heads and financial gurus. Earlier in the day, the Dow took a dive of more than 500 points and, judging from big drops in the Asian and European markets and the distinctly downward plunge of futures before Friday’s market opened, many feared the worst.

But the experiences of this strange year have re-defined what the “worst” now means. Once, a drop of over 300 points in the Dow would have been a really terrible, horrible, four or maybe five-martini day. Last Friday, it was actually cause for celebration.

We’ve become accustomed to wide daily swings and all the panic and fear those cause. The magic question, of course, is: when do we hit bottom? This should be the big buying signal to go back into the market, take some of that cash currently being hoarded on the sidelines, and take advantage of stocks which are down 50%, 60% or even 70% or more, from where they used to be just a short time ago. Paper losses right now are staggering. My condolences sincerely go out both to those who are already retired and living on fixed incomes and those who had planned to retire this year, or next, or the one after.

Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Mouse,” is often quoted for the saying that "The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry," (though the phrase in the original Scots of the poem is "The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley," which is quite a bit tougher on the intellectual palate of the modern speaker). It certainly seems that most of what we took for granted back in the 20th Century is now all up for grabs nearly nine years into this strange new Century and Millennium.

World economics now resemble the cube-shaped, Bizzaro World from the old 1960’s Superman DC comic books, where, if you are too young to remember, everything familiar in our world was the opposite there. We are engaged in two serious wars in faraway places, with many more raging that we are not engaged in. The continental US was attacked in 2001 for the first time since the War of 1812. Our collected problems now include a crumbling infrastructure which will cost trillions to rebuild, leaving us no choice unless we want to see bridges collapsing like the one in Minneapolis, and tunnels sprouting leaks like Boston’s Big Dig with hundreds of places where the Massachusetts Bay dribbled into the tunnels running underneath, killing a poor woman motorist when a portion of the tunnel caved in on her. And, lest we forget, the Baby Boomers are graying and will soon distort our Medicare, Social Security and healthcare systems beyond recognition. Many hospitals are insolvent and may not last through the onslaught of more unemployed and uninsured. Weather is strange, whatever the cause, gas costs way too much, and our oceans are turning into cesspools.

The ancient Chinese proverb: “May you live in interesting times!” (maybe more legend than fact and actually a curse), certainly applies to the curious times in which we now find ourselves living, where we can actually be happy that the Dow only fell 300 points and not 1000.

I attended a Conference for legal and accounting professionals in Chicago in October 2007 where the speakers discussed for two days ‘The Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” as this nightmare was only beginning to unfold as of a year ago. Not one of the eminent speakers there dared to predict anything as dire as the total wipeout of 3 of the 5 major investment banks, with the 2 survivors fleeing to the safety of full-Monty banking regulatory structure; the crashing and burning of Countrywide, Wamu, AIG, Wachovia, Lehman, Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and a whole host of others; the utter devastation of trillions of dollars of paper wealth in the markets in the blink of an eye, or; the 60-65 trillion dollar booby prize of all those credit default swaps hiding out there like improvised explosive devices on balance sheets worldwide.

May this week prove to be a little less “interesting,” so that we can all catch our collective breath.