DJIA In Trouble

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 21, 6:27AM EDT

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The DJIA starts the week at 12,269.38. There are plenty of forecasters who believe it will reach 11,000 long before its makes it back to 14,000. The index is down 7% in less than two months. The so-called headwinds against stocks number at least three. The most obvious is trouble in Europe. The recession there will not only hurt the demand for goods and services from US companies; there could be bank balance sheet fallout for some American financial firms, if Greece defaults. China’s economy has also hit a snag, and that is another region where demand for US products will likely falter.

Last, key data about the US economy has been relatively poor. The number of jobs added per month has dropped well below the 200,000 pace set earlier this year. Housing starts have improved somewhat, but home prices have not. If there will be any stimulus added to the economy by the federal government, it will not be until after the election–which means next year. And, both individuals and companies are uncertain about what their tax status will be. Congress could decide to allow relatively low tax rates which have been in place since Bush, to expire.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.