– 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.”

The value of commercial buildings fell 1.03 per cent between January and February, the largest monthly decline since at least 1993, when the industry was just emerging from a deep slump.

The fall in national property prices comes as banks have retrenched on lending due to credit crisis and the slowing economy, causing the volume of deals to slow sharply. The market for commercial mortgage-backed securities, which until last August was a major route to cheaper borrowing, has largely ground to a halt.

“The party is over,” says Mish Shedlock, on his blog, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, “and so are insane financing schemes. Commercial real estate is going to be a disaster. That disaster is not priced in, nor is the effect of a slowing CRE market on jobs, on sentiment, on consumer spending, or on foreclosures.”

According to CNN “part of the disconnect may be due to the fact that nondurable goods, such as food and gasoline, makes up only 12% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the main measure of inflation.

In addition, food and energy prices are eliminated from the so-called core CPI, which many economists tend to focus more closely on because they claim food and gas prices are volatile.

But food and energy costs are a very important part of household budgets. And those prices have been skyrocketing: Gas prices were up about 21% over the 12 months ending in April.

So-called “seasonal adjustments” also come into play. Because of these adjustments, the government reported that gas prices were 2% in April, despite the fact that on a non-adjusted basis, gas prices rose 5.6% from March.

For more on how how seasonal adjusting skews inflation, read on at Mish Shedlock’s blog.