“Better to miss the first 20% of a bull market than try to time the bottom.” Amen to that. Yesterday, the Dow climbed 432 points. There are signs the credit markets are “loosening,” says BusinessWeek. And Fed head Ben Bernanke has called for another stimulus package. Could this be the bottom of the bear? Absolutely. Then again…

– The S&P 500 has moved up or down at least 1% in 10 of October’s 13 trading sessions. The record for these kind of swings was set in 1929.

– According to Infectious Greed blogger Paul Kederovsky, “The Dow is now up almost 20% from its lows of a little more than a week ago, and the S&P isn’t far behind.” He remains convinced that we “end up churning away for months as the market tries to figure out how bad this downturn is likely to be.”

– And there’s always the chance, as Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning says, that we looking at a “lost decade” like the one the Japanese suffered through the 1990s.

– As picked up by the Cafe Hayek blog, David Henderson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, says government regulation may be the cause of the current crisis…and therefore a strange cure:

The best evidence is that the problem was triggered by previous government regulation combined with an unrealistic belief on the part of many people that housing prices could only go up. It is important to understand the cause because, if we do not, we are unlikely to choose good solutions. Indeed, the US federal government has, for the last few months, chosen one bad solution after another.

–  As Mish Shedlock puts it over at his Global Economic Trend and Analysis blog, “Ignoring asset bubbles and dealing with them later is complete foolishness.”

– David Leonhardt in The New York Times’ Economix blog says is unlikely to be mild and short, although some pundits are calling that way.

Households took on an enormous amount of debt in recent years, and they will have to pay back that debt. Now the government is taking on ever more debt, and those bills, too, will need to be paid. The repayment of those bills will act as a drag on growth, and the economy probably will not feel truly healthy for years. How many years — two? Three? Five? Who knows.

– US stock futures weakened today ahead of earnings reports from DuPont, 3M and Pfizer. MarketWatch reports that “S&P 500 futures fell 8.8 points to 981.60 and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 20.5 points to 1,339.50. Dow industrial futures fell 99 points.”