The Financial Crisis

is a concern that credit markets will tighten up, i.e that banks, their balance full of lousy mortgages, will not be able to make other loans. For example, short term lines of credit to businesses to meet their payrolls, as a scary example. Once such a trend starts, it could accelerate, spiraling downward. That's called The Great Depression, not a recession.

The crisis is not about the Dow Jones average, or the stock market in general. Sure, the stock market reflects the above concerns, along with a lot of other factors, and then wildly exaggerates them on a daily basis. So the stock market is a reflection of the crisis, not the crisis itself, and it's a distorted funhouse mirror, not an accurate, highly-correlated reflection.

So, if the market falls to collapse today or tomorrow, or next week, that doesn't really mean anything.

Full disclosure: I am way over my head on this whole situation, but I have read enough to understand this basic point, or at least to understand what apparently responsible, informed adults have told me. That is, the current crisis may or may not be as bad as Paulson's worst nightmare, but, in any event, it is not, directly, a stock market crisis.