Dow suffers record loss; world stocks plunge; Bush, House to try again

WASHINGTON – World financial markets reeled and stunned lawmakers groped for their next move Monday after House Republicans abandoned President Bush in droves to help kill his $700 billion proposal to rescue the financial services industry.

Even before the vote was announced, stocks began tanking on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average nose-dived by more than 777 points, its worst fall ever, in a sell-off that swept markets around the globe.

As fears rose that the credit crisis was spreading, Asian and European markets closed sharply down, and governments in at least eight European countries took steps to begin rescuing large banking institutions.

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Auto dealer Bill Heard Enterprises Inc. will shutter its 13 stores on Friday, the Columbus [Ga.] Ledger-Enquirer reported Sept. 24.

The shutdown includes Bill Heard Chevrolet in Sanford.

The company began in Columbus in 1919, founded by W.T. Heard Sr. It developed into the country’s biggest Chevrolet dealer for years and runs dealerships in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Nevada.

But the souring economy brought less demand for new cars and GMAC recently eliminated Bill Heard’s credit for inventory, the paper noted. In July 2007, Bill Heard also faced a $50 million deceptive advertising lawsuit and was bombarded with a litany of complaints from consumers in the states where it operated.

It closed a store in Arizona earlier in September.

According to its Web site, Bill Heard sells “around $2.5 billion” a year and employs more than 3,500.

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Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) — John McCain said made a surprise announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign and called on Democratic rival Barack Obama to postpone their first debate until Congress hammers out a plan to steady the financial markets.

Obama rebuffed McCain, saying it’s “more important than ever” for the candidates to tell voters how they would deal with the crisis. He said they can work with Congress while campaigning. “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once,” Obama said.

Both men said they wanted to reach a bipartisan solution to the credit crisis. McCain said the Bush administration’s $700 billion proposal to rescue struggling financial companies and unlock credit markets won’t pass Congress in its current form.

“It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the administration’s proposal,” McCain said in New York. “We are running out of time.”

The financial crisis has overshadowed the presidential campaign and both candidates have been seeking to demonstrate their leadership on the issue. McCain and Obama this week largely agreed on conditions they want included in any rescue plan, including limits on executive pay and a mechanism to recoup taxpayer money.

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The Web site for Bank of America was down on Monday for some customers, a spokeswoman for the bank said.

Tara Burke cited “temporary systems issues” and declined to say what the cause was or whether it was related to Bank of America’s proposed purchase of Merrill Lynch or other recent turmoil on Wall Street.

“We’ve had sporadic interruption of online banking service. It doesn’t impact customer information, just the ability to access it,” she said. “We are continuing to correct the error. The site should return shortly.”

The site had been down for several hours as of midday Pacific time, according to Burke.

One colleague, who made it only halfway through logging in to the Bank of America site before it timed out, got an e-mail a short time later with the subject line: “Remember how convenient it is to bank online?” The e-mail provided instructions for how to reset the password if you have had problems logging in because you forgot your online ID or password.

It’s unclear if the e-mail is an unfortunate auto response to the temporary site outage or if it is just really bad timing.

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Concern that gasoline prices were going to spike much higher because of the impact of Hurricane Ike on oil refineries in Texas sent many people across the US hurrying to local gas stations Thursday night and Friday to fill up their tanks. There was also concern that gasoline supplies might be temporarily interrupted because of the hurricane.

Gasoline prices rose sharply on Thursday evening and Friday morning, out of concerns that Hurricane Ike would disrupt or possibly destroy oil refineries in its path in Texas and Louisiana. Fears of disrupted supply or higher prices — or both — brought out lines of gasoline-buyers at stations all over the US.

Why The Rise?

The prices rose while Hurricane Ike was still in the Gulf of Mexico, and before any damage had occurred there. Why?

“Panic buying” is the short answer, said Step Hipple, a professor of economics at East Tennessee State University.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s web site, “If demand rises quickly or supply declines unexpectedly due to refinery production problems or lagging imports, gasoline inventories (stocks) may decline rapidly.” (Go to http://gaswatch.energy.gov for more information.)

Gasoline stocks may also decline rapidly when fears of a shortage cause “panic buying,” said Hipple.

After the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC were the hot items yesterday, talk has turned back to Hurricane Ike as it gets ready to make landfall late today or early tomorrow in Galveston, Texas and is expected to make more than an appearance in Houston as well if it stays on it’s current path.

Forecasters expect Ike, a Category 2 storm, to strengthen before its center makes landfall late Friday or early Saturday. Winds upward of 100 mph may reach the Texas coast by midnight, the hurricane center warned.

Not surprisingly, Galveston, TX is the talk all over the news channels and hot internet searches include Galveston weather, news, hurricane and even webcams. Webcams! Check them out at Galveston.com. Stay tuned to all the developing news at cnn.com as everyone all over the US may soon feel the after effects at the gas pump.

According to the AP, the oil and gas industry was closely watching the storm because it was headed straight for the nation’s biggest complex of refineries and petrochemical plants. The upper Texas coast accounts for one-fifth of U.S. refining capacity.

No surprise that today is dominated by news of the September 11 attacks of 7 years ago and the memorials and rememberances that have and will occur throughout just about every city in the US. A quick view of the hot search terms around the internet reveal that phrases such as 9/11, September 11, Twin Towers, Ground Zero, World Trade Center and even Freedom Tower are all at or near the top in most search engines such as Google and Yahoo…

Even the possiblity of category 3 hurricane Ike slamming into Texas late Friday or early Saturday was pushed down on most internet news sites for at least a day as the Nation remembers where it was in 2001 and the emotions of that day come out again. Being from New York and Washington, DC, I’ll definitely remember images from that day for the rest of my life.

Read more at CNN.com