Dow loses 300 points

That brings down the index to under 6800 (6763 to be exact). Actually, market sentiment hasn't changed much for several weeks. Here’s the deal: Nobody in their right mind wants to reenter the market because the prevailing view is that things will get worse before they get better. From the NYT:

“It’s pretty despondent everywhere,” said Dwyfor Evans, a strategist at State Street Global Markets in Hong Kong. “O.K., there are signs that some of the leading indicators have stabilized to some extent, but it’s at a very, very low level, and we’re not seeing corporate investment picking up, or consumers starting to spend again — in other words, the traditional mechanisms by which economies come out of a recession are absent at this time.”

This Friday comes the February unemployment report, and David Dietze of Point View Financial Services says “We could be in for a shocker.” Economists expect a loss of 675,000 jobs in February and an unemployment rate of 8 percent.