DJIA up 936 points at the closing bell

The companies that make up the Dow, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 collectively added more than 11% to their market value today. Some commentators (I've pretty much settled on Bloomberg for market news on TV) are saying it's a "bear market bounce," bulls are tending to focus on industry sectors, and nobody is saying we're out of the woods. It's too soon after the close to read online and print punditry.

Today's big rise pretty much gets us back to where we were last Wednesday. Clearly the promise of cash infusions from central bankers around the world helped steady nerves. Paul Krugman (who, in case you hadn't heard, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics) tips his hat to Gordon Brown, British P.M. and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling:

...[T]he Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.

Krugman blames Henry Paulson's initial plan on his and the Bush administration's ideology, and their resultant reluctance to exchange a government cash infusion for an ownership stake. Interestingly,

This sort of temporary part-nationalization, which is often referred to as an “equity injection,” is the crisis solution advocated by many economists — and sources told The Times that it was also the solution privately favored by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman. [Emphasis mine.]

Continuing to savage the current administration, Krugman concludes with this:

I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.

Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.

We'll know only in the next few days and weeks whether a more confident mood continues to hold on Wall Street and in markets around the world. I hope, however, that thousand-point swings in the Dow do not become a permanent feature. Whiplash is whiplash, and when it occurs, it's a safe bet it's not indicative of safe driving.