Investors are as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs

Crude oil rose $2.76 to $71.51 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold rose.
The stock slump at day's end marked an opposite to the pattern seen on Tuesday, when traders chipped away at a steep slide by the close and the major indexes ended little changed.
The slide in stocks has rattled investors still shaken by the market's plunge in late 2008 and early 2009.
"Everyone is so scared from what happened back in the big crash and now they're just all gun-shy," said Frank Ingarra, co-portfolio manager at Hennessy Funds.
U.S. manufacturing has been strong throughout the recovery. April's figures were boosted by a big rise in transportation orders. Excluding transportation, orders fell 1 percent.

SHOOT: Transportation rose because oil prices are low. That's the only happy pixel in the unhappy econicon. Energy pricves hold sway - if economies rise, energy prices respond and will kill gains. Then the process repeats, but the point is, economic growth is over, because energy growth is history.

clipped from finance.yahoo.com NEW YORK (AP) -- A drop in the euro set off a late-day slide in stocks Wednesday and sent the Dow Jones industrial average to its first close below 10,000 in nearly four months. The Dow, up 135 points in morning trading, ended down about 69. It was the eighth drop for the Dow in 10 days. Wednesday's trading extended a streak of volatility since stocks went to their highest level of the year in late April. China has been seeking ways to diversify its massive foreign exchange holdings out of dollars for some time. However any indication that it was losing confidence in the euro, leading it to sell some portion of its European bond holdings, would deliver a major blow to the European currency. The sliding euro has become a symbol of waning confidence in Europe's ability to contain its debt problems. The euro remains close to the four-year low it hit last week. It fell to $1.2179 Wednesday. The Dow fell 69.30, or 0.7 percent, to 9,974.45. It was the first close below 10,000 since Feb. 8