Another bad day for stocks

At mid-session the Dow is down more than 160 points (it had been off 200 points just a few minutes ago). There is no single culprit behind today's losses - just a combination of nagging concerns about the euro (sinking to its lowest level since October 2008), global debt, and the fragility of the recovery. You can tell everybody has the jitters - volume is heavy and the so-called Volatility Index jumped 21 percent. From the WSJ:

For U.S. investors, especially those with memories of the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s, the concern is that debt crises like Greece's will spread to other euro-zone members, weakening growth in a major market and hurting American financial companies with ties to European banks. "You have to worry about the counterparty risk and clearly our banks are closely tied with other global large banks," said Jerome Heppelmann, portfolio manager at Old Mutual Focused Fund.

Little of this is directly tied to America's Main Street economy, but if the world financial picture is shaky, there's little chance that the U.S. will grow the way it needs to. Keep in mind that in past recoveries growth of 7 percent or 8 percent was not unusual. This year, economists are looking at the 3-ish range. A survey out today by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia finds that economists are forecasting growth of 3.3 percent in 2010, 3.1 percent in 2011, 3.2 percent in 2012, and 2.9 percent in 2013. These are not bad numbers, but they're not nearly strong enough to handle the backlog of unemployed Americans.