Short term bottom here for DOWFunny - eveyone realizes that the mortgage issue in and of itself was completely resolvable with limited impact on the economy and a large impact on a small number of investors and public. Instead - you have people trying to protect themselves by liquidating equities and freezing credit. this has the effect of panicing the entire world economy, leading to a different group of paniced investors trying to protect themselves...and so on...and so on.
Probably too late to reverse the damage done - not by the mortgage backed securities isues, but by the reaction to that by everyone including likely many of you (who's sitting on more cash today than they were last week? - bet most of us are). So we're part of the problem. This chain of events will sell alot of books.
That said, without the follow-on panic,we'd have likley had a minor recession and the Dow would have gradually moved towards 10000. With the panic, far more damage, and the Dow should bottom around 8 and then bounce to bewteen 8500 and 9000 in the medium term. Once the economy starts to go (who knows how long that will be) - boom times for a decade.
My bet is that BNK goes slow burn for the next 6-12 months and is sitting in a great spot when things get going.