The Dow was down another 679 points today. Twelve more days like that and it hits zero. The point being that there aren't going to be 12 more days like that, at least not in a row.

At this point I'm getting really sick of trying offer explanations for why the market did what it did. It would seem to be a combination of deep uncertainty about how the banking system rescue being mooted by the Treasury Department is going to play out for financial stocks (who gets saved? who doesn't? how will existing shareholders be treated?) and increasing fear about how hard the recession is going to hit nonfinancial companies. But it could also just be fatigue, or panic, or something else. Pure random chance seems pretty unlikely, though.

Prices are starting to look pretty cheap relative to past earnings, but nobody has any clear idea how much future earnings are going to look like those of the past. A lot of people thought stocks looked really cheap in early 1930, and they got totally burned.

That said, my bet is that this isn't 1930 at all, and at some point over the next few days or weeks or months, those who buy into stocks will end up being richly rewarded. Not a lot of people seem to think today is that point, though.

Update: Because I'm so busy (I've been working on a story for Fortune this week), they made Barbara write the straight TIME.com lede on the horrible day on Wall Street. Burn on her. But she actually did it really well.

And a lot of other things, too—like a healthcare research facility at the University of Louisville, science labs at Western Kentucky University, and water and sewer lines in rural communities—because it was able to sell $400 million worth of municipal bonds on Tuesday.

This is great news, considering that the muni market had pretty much ground to a halt. Kentucky was one of the first states to get back out there in a big way. Yesterday I was talking with Jonathan Miller, Kentucky's secretary for finance and administration, who explained what an emotional rollercoaster ride the muni market has been of late: "We were very nervous about this, and then the bailout passed, and we were relieved, and then the market tanked again. We were really worried—we had encountered a lot of pessimism and skepticism that we'd be able to sell these bonds."

Now, of course, he's glad that they did, not just because of the small role Kentucky played in restoring a modicum of confidence to the market (after Kentucky floated its bonds, Ohio immediately followed), but also because it's not such a bad time to be plowing money into public works projects. Like states around the nation, Kentucky is seeing signs of a slowdown—tax revenue was off 5% in September, compared to the same month last year—and nothing says Keynesian response better than building a bunch of new buildings and sewer lines.

UPDATE: Here's why I was talking to Jonathan Miller.

Barbara!

A couple days ago I wrote a post ribbing Nobel laureate Robert Lucas for his statement at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Economic Association that:

Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.

Afterwards I sent him an e-mail asking if he had updated his views. His response:

Why don't we wait until the recession/depression actually arrives? Of course, I was and am surprised at the extent of the liquidity crisis---and would have written my AEA address differently if I had foreseen it---but Bernanke is dealing with it in a forceful way and I think we still have a good chance of averting a major recession.