Barack Obama said today that Americans should ignore the tailspin on Wall Street as he pushes through with insane economic policies.

From The Associated Press:

"What I'm looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability of the United States ... to regain its footing," Obama said after meeting in the Oval Office.

The president said he is "absolutely confident" that those things will happen. But Obama also said that it will take time for the mistakes of the past to work their way through the system and that the spectacular losses happening now are a "natural reaction" to those mistakes.

"We dug a very deep hole for ourselves," Obama said. "There were a lot of bad decisions that were made. We are cleaning up that mess. It's going to be sort of full of fits and starts, in terms of getting the mess cleaned up, but it's going to get cleaned up. And we are going to recover, and we are going to emerge more prosperous, more unified, and I think more protected from systemic risk."

I feel better, don't you?

The Dow has dropped 12 percent since Obama was sworn in as president. The Dow has dropped 52 percent since Democrats took control of Congress after the November 2006 election. How low can it go?