Wall Street’s Inauguration Day drop is one for the books

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History was made in more ways than one today: You just lived through Wall Street’s worst Inauguration Day of the modern era.

Led by another brutal sell-off in financial stocks, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index plunged 44.90 points, or 5.3%, to 805.22.

Since 1941, when the S&P 500 was created, no other Inauguration Day has even been close in terms of losses. The next worst was the 2% drop in the index on Jan. 20, 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural -- and the last time the nation was gripped by economic woes serious enough to conjure the 1930s.

Dow Jones & Co. says today’s 4% loss in the Dow industrial average was the biggest decline in the 30-stock index on any Inauguration Day since the index was launched in 1896.

On the last Inauguration Day -- in 2005, when President George W. Bush took the oath for his second term -- the Dow slipped 0.6% and the S&P 500 gave up 0.8%.

Blame today on President Obama? Some people will, no doubt. The Dow already was down about 2% when he began his inaugural address. The index doubled that loss by the end of trading.

But what ails this market is the same old, same old: We still seem to be far, far from the end point of tallying the financial sector’s losses from the credit binge of the last decade. That’s why major bank stocks have been in another vicious downward spiral for the last two weeks, and crashed nearly 20% today alone.

This financial and economic mess is for Obama to fix. The public wants to believe he can do it, but Wall Street, for the moment, is bereft of hope.

-- Tom Petruno