More pain on Wall Street

If you thought it couldn't get worse, you were sadly mistaken.

Wall Street suffered yet another mega decline on Thursday, with the Dow Jones industrials weathering a drop of 679 points, pushing the index well below 9,000.

The Blue Chip index ended the day at 8,579, its lowest level in five years. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. 

"Psychologically, now is a tough time for any investor, whether you're invested in a company-sponsored profit-sharing plan or a mutual fund," said Nancy D. Sidhu, vice president and senior economist with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Thursday's performance offered a sobering contrast to the market conditions of a year ago, when the Dow hit its all-time high.

This from the Associated Press:

"The story is getting to be like that movie 'Groundhog Day,'" said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. He pointed to the still-frozen credit markets, and Libor, the bank-to-bank lending rate that remains stubbornly high despite interest rate cuts this week by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks.

"Until that starts coming down, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone getting excited about stocks," Hogan said. "Everything we're seeing is historic. The problem is historic, the solutions are historic, and unfortunately, the sell-off is historic. It's not the kind of history you want to be making."