We hear you loud and clear, Dr. Ben! It was shaping up to be a good day on Wall Street anyway. But after the Federal Reserve's announcement at 2:15 pm ET, stocks bolted into the blue. The Dow closed up a steaming 336 points -- for the very best of reasons.

Why the huge run-up today? Because the Fed gave investors all they could have hoped for, and more. First, the central bank voted to chop the crucially important federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks lend overnight money to each other) by half a point, to 4.75%.

Ahead of the Fed meeting, some pundits were expecting a quarter-point drop and some were expecting a half. A few curmudgeons (foolishly) predicted no cut at all. Bernanke & Co. decided to go for the whole nine yards.

But they didn't stop there. In an even more dramatic gesture (dramatic, at least, to the financial insiders who understand such things), the Fed pulled a surprise. They slashed the discount rate by half a point, too, to 5.25%.

In normal times, nobody pays attention to the discount rate, because almost nobody borrows at that rate. The discount window is typically reserved for emergency loans that the Fed makes to institutions facing financial difficulties.

Last month, the Fed slashed the discount rate by half a point -- and even urged healthy institutions to take advantage of the concession. Now Ben's crew has dropped the discount rate again.

It's as if Bernanke is saying to the financial markets: "I've got a firehose full of cash, and I'm going to keep shooting it until this conflagration (the credit panic) is thoroughly doused. Got the message?"

I don't know about other investors, but the message hasn't been lost on me. This latest Fed move, and the market reaction to it, are almost a carbon copy of what happened at the end of the 1998 Asia/Russia/Long-Term Capital Management crisis.

Back then, fed funds dropped from 5.5% to 4.75%. Then as now, the stock market exploded with a daily gain (October 9, 1998) very much like today's. And the S&P went on to skyrocket 39% over the next 12 months.

I'm not predicting quite such a moonshot this time, because the animal spirits of the 1990s are gone. Looking out a year, however, I think a 20%-25% rise in the blue chip indexes is well within the realm of possibility.