I've been meaning to put together a comparison of past bear markets but the folks at dshort.com already have. Phew, ducked a pile of work!

If you have any interest at all in equity markets do spend the time to click through this set of charts arranged in a slide show. Its informative and fascinating.

Click on chart to view slides

At some point in the near future I'll weigh in on what it all means.

In the meantime, here's an interesting excerpt from a speech delivered yesterday by James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

Tonight I talked about three funerals and a wedding. The ongoing financial market turmoil may have caused the death of many cherished ideas about how the macroeconomy operates. One funeral was for the idea of the Great Moderation. Certainly financial markets have seen exceptional volatility recently, and some behavior in those markets has been unprecedented. Still, I am not ready to bury the Great Moderation yet-we will need a lot more very volatile data on the real side of the economy to truly depart from the experience of the past 25 years. A second funeral was for our financial system as we have known it. That transformation has occurred and continues, with repercussions for U.S. and global financial market regulation. A third funeral was for monetary policy defined as nominal interest rate targeting. At least over the near term, any additional influence through interest rate reductions will be limited, and the focus of monetary policy may turn to quantity measures. The wedding-the idea on the rise-is fiscal policy defined as more direct intervention in certain parts of the private sector. While the Fed will continue to be innovative in providing liquidity to markets through existing facilities and possibly some new programs, an important part of the response to ongoing financial market turmoil will come from fiscal policy intervention. This runs counter to much of the thinking in macroeconomic policy circles over the past two decades. It may be discomforting or rewarding or both, but stabilization policy in the coming months and quarters is likely to look very different from what we have been accustomed to seeing. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard