Were you surprised this morning? The consensus among everyone I spoke with yesterday and this morning was be prepared for a blood bath. After news on Sunday that Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) was being bought out by JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) for a song ($2 per share) and the Federal Reserve Board was cutting the discount rate over the weekend, many were anticipating a 500 to 600 point drop in line with the sell off of about 4.5% in the Hong Kong and Japanese markets.

As of this moment, the DJIA is only down a meager 0.51% or about 61 points. Now that's shocking in a good way. Even at the open it was only down about 1%. Perhaps investors are so numb from yesterday they are to stupified or petrified to act.

In any event the market can swing wildly in a day and will likely be changed by the time you read this. It was even in positive territory for a fleeting moment. I have no idea where we will end up but two things come to mind. The first, is that this sort of anomaly is what brings out the conspiracy theorists. The second view is that even though there will be lots more pain, perhaps this past Sunday, when the selections were made for the College Basketball brackets and we realized March Madness was upon us, we also saw final capitulation of the last of the optimists who thought we were not heading for a recession.

This might be like pulling out of a nosedive right before we hit the ground. Maybe we have had the Economic TKO wrote about last week..

Perhaps Wall Street traders and investors are also the people that get most hyped up during March Madness and now that the brackets are out they are too busy with office pools to bother with the market, and we will see more downside after they have their forms filled out. Stay tuned.

UPDATE Final: DJIA: 11,972.25, +21.16, 0.18%

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the design and research principal for an architecture and planning firm. He writes Chasing Value and Serious Money columns. Disclosure: I am a shareholder in BSC.