the "dead cat bounce"

I heard an expression today that I've never heard before, not being an avid follower of the stock market until recently.

It seems that Wall Street made a dramatic jump by nearly 320 points today after four days of falling prices. The expression, "dead cat bounce," is being used as part of a question. The question is, was today only a temporary rise in what is otherwise a falling market? Was today an example of a "dead cat bounce?" ("Even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough.")

Until recently I could not have cared less about such things. Some of us children of the 50's and 60's grew up thinking that retirement was going to be out of the question because we'd never live so long. Thanks to the Cold War, Khrushchev's threat to bury us, images of the mushroom cloud, the Berlin Wall, Viet Nam, and the prospect of gasoline selling for as much as a dollar a gallon (yes, chillun, it's true . . . I once bought gas for 13.9 cents a gallon in Perry, Florida, where they knew how to run a gas war), the future looked awfully bleak. Doing our duck-and-cover drills at Tarpon Springs Elementary School, we joked that if the Russians fired their ICBM's at MacDill Air Force Base, they'd miss and hit us instead. Har-de-har.

Then it dawned on many of us that we might actually live so long as to become a burden on our children, and we took new interest in 401 plans, defined-benefit plans versus defined-contribution plans, annuities, and the cost of health insurance -- all those old-folks worries. The question of whether today was just a "dead cat bounce" has real meaning . . . not as exciting as Huck Finn's cure for warts, but more meaningful.