Stocks Plummet Day After Election; What Happened?

Many fingers are being pointed, but what's to blame?

Stocks are taking a horrific beating the day after the election. After being down as much as 369 points (2.8 percent) during trading today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has improved and is now down only close to 290 points.

The drop is very scary for investors and the country overall, but not catastrophic. The drop is not even half of the 778-point loss Americans saw in Sept. 2008, which marked the biggest single-day point loss ever. That day's loss knocked out approximately $1.2 trillion in market value.

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On the first day of trading after September 11, 2001, the market lost 684.81 on Sept. 17, 2001. So comparatively this is not so bad.

No one actually knows why the stock market does the things it does. Some (Republicans) are attributing the decline to the gods of Wall Street reacting to President Obama's reelection. Most reasonable people, however, attribute the precipitous decline to renewed worries over Europe and the oncoming "fiscal cliff." The European Union said unemployment there could remain high for years.

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