Dow back over 12,000

The AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile helped a lot (Wall Street likes big takeover deals), pushing other telecom shares. But things still seem kind of tentative, what with Japan's nuclear troubles and continued uncertainty out of Libya and the Middle East. Just a lot of crosscurrents to contend with. From the NYT:

Like everyone else, corporate executives, economists and financial analysts in Tokyo, New York, London and beyond struggled last week to wrap their heads around the scale of this disaster. But, as they so often do, the analysts quickly fell to work assessing the implications for companies, markets and economies. At times, it was almost surreal: On Tuesday, Laszlo Birinyi, a prominent stock market analyst based in Westport, Conn., e-mailed around a succinct report titled "Nuclear Meltdowns at a Glance." This is what happens on Wall Street. If you're not immersed in the culture, it might be hard to understand the cool calculus that is applied to world events, however dire those events might be. After the quake hit on March 11, the CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow told viewers, "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that." He later apologized.

The Dow closed Monday up 178 points.