The stock market has been so bad this year -- and since mid-September -- that it seems like a tremendous accomplishment that the S&P 500 is now down only 12 percent year to date. Last Monday it was down 25 percent year to date. To keep these numbers in perspective, the S&P was down 38 percent last year and 22 percent in 2002. Other than that, you have to go back to 1974 for a year when the S&P was down as much as 12 percent. While the economy is terrible, the stock market has been discounting a lot. We will only know in retrospect when the bottom hits. But the results of past financial crises show that once the crisis passes, stock markets have had significant rebounds within the first two years.