And then there was last week’s “unprecedented” 2-day 929-point Dow dive, which was the largest 2-day point decline in the 112-year history of the Dow. Still, both the DJIA and the S&P 500 didn’t even come close to breaking their respective October 10th intraday capitulation price lows, eliciting this commentary from “The Sentiment Trader:”

“Going back to 1994, we have never had 2 consecutive TRIN (or the Arms Index) readings of greater than 3.0. Yesterday and today we saw readings over 4.0 and this has bullish implications over the short term. This reading, coupled with the lower volume over this dramatic 10% selloff, argues for this being part of the month long bottoming process. It is vital that the October lows of 850 hold in the S&P but based on our readings this should be part of the bottoming process and not the beginning of another significant leg down for the stock market.”

Plainly, I’m hopeful that the October 10th “lows” hold; my firm is using them as our “uncle point” both for investment and trading positions.

But it isn’t just the various equity markets that are “unprecedented.”

To be sure, US consumer-confidence readings fell to a record low recently, the Bank of England lowered its key lending rate by 150 basis points, to a 54-year low of 3%, the IMF said the “advanced economies” (31 nations) would contract by 0.3% in 2009 (the first time these economies will have contracted since the IMF was founded in 1945), inflation-adjusted US consumer spending fell at a 3.1% annual rate in 2008’s third quarter, for its largest drop since the second quarter 1980, Thomson Reuters’ index of 34 retailers showed a comparable-store sales decline of 0.7% in October (its lowest level ever).

Moreover, friends of mine at one of NYC’s trendiest retailers told us business is off more than 50%; our “black-car” chauffeur in NYC told me the black-car industry in Manhattan is doing 50,000 fewer assignments a week, auto sales have collapsed… And the list goes on.

Yet by far the most unprecedented event of last week was the election of Barack Obama. I actually thought there would be a celebratory equity-market rally Wednesday morning on this unprecedented election; alas, it was not to be. Evidently, “the Street” was worried about an Obama regime that will increase long-term capital-gains taxes, raise taxes on dividends, increase the size of government, increase the size of entitlement programs - well, you get the idea.

If the Obama administration moves toward larger government, like Franklin D. Roosevelt did following the Great Depression, then we’re in trouble. Then, there was a huge backlash against business, and business leaders, amid calls for the government to fix all of life’s inequalities. And if you don’t believe me, Google FDR’s 1933 and 1937 inaugural addresses, which read like they could have been written yesterday.