Wall St closes lower on last day of record year

Wall Street staged a mild retreat today, quietly closing a year that will be remembered for the stock market’s great comeback – a year-end rally that pushed the Dow Jones industrials past 12,000 for the first time.

By all accounts, 2006 ended up a very good year for stocks as bullish investors bounced back from a slumping housing market and the Federal Reserve’s two-year campaign of interest rate hikes.