Once there was a simpler time, when pretty much everything that happened in the financial world had a straightforward explanation.

How the prosecutors must have wished to have a go at Ralph Cioffi in the flesh! If only Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, the two Bear Stearns fund managers acquitted yesterday of insider trading and other charges, had had the gall to take the stand in their own defenses and to submit to what the Feds must have hoped would be a withering cross-examination. Well, no such luck.

Remember when we all were going to drown in a sea of offers for male enhancement pills and messages from mysterious bureaucrats with tales of millions hidden in Swiss bank accounts? “Holy mackerel, the Internet is falling!” the cry went out, and the annoyance of junk e-mail messages was built up into an international scourge, costing untold billions in lost time spent hitting the delete key.

With a close over 10,220 on Monday, the Dow Jones had its best showing of 2009. Like the day a few weeks earlier when it broke the five-figure mark for the first time since October 2008, the market’s achievement was greeted not by champagne and celebration, but by introspection among economists and investors. Can this rally be trusted? Is it a real rebound or something else?

As if current economic conditions weren’t dire enough, several forces conspire to push the media sector’s financial performance further downward. These factors are an obsession with market share, price wars, and first movers’ ability to set the tone, often for the worse.

I’ll give Wal-Mart (WMT) credit for this much: Its new ad campaign has certainly got people talking. Some of the ads have a saccharine story line with people kissing on buses and such, but here’s a stripped-down version that highlights the central claim: Wal-Mart saves the average American family $3,100 a year. If, like me, you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart, you might let such figures wash over you, but the company insists that it’s true no matter where you shop.