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2008-09-20 Home Front Economy

Bush says ''unprecedented action'' being taken to deal with financial crisis

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Posted by Fred 2008-09-20 00:00|| || Front Page|| [2 views ] Top

#1 ...Over at Instapundit, the Perfessor posted a comment that made me realize just how bad it nearly got:

"Trust me you do not want to experience a full-scale bank run in contemporary America. Im not sure how many people realize how close we were to the wheels coming off at about noon yesterday, as major commercial-paper processing banks like State Street lost 30% 60% of their value in about 2 hours. Want evidence: When was the last time you heard of the U.S. government identifying a problem, developing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar program and announcing it within about 48 hours?"

Mike

Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2008-09-20 08:20|| 2008-09-20 08:20|| Front Page Top

#2 Yup. This MBA is no fan of government intervention, but what happened over the last few trading days was a near total meltdown of the market.

Free markets depend on information and on reliable mechanisms for trades to complete. Neither was in evidence on Thursday as naked short selling vastly outstripped both the financial institutions' shares outstanding and the resolution process - remember, short sales have 14 days to complete. That's why short selling was shut down temporarily, a modified version of the SEC's rarely used power to shut down all trading if markets become deeply disorderly.

Posted by lotp 2008-09-20 11:10|| 2008-09-20 11:10|| Front Page Top

#3 Free markets have better sense than the Clinton Administration. Read this Sept. 30, 1999 NYT article to see what precipitated all this and when it started:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&scp=1&sq=&st=nyt

Posted by Darrell 2008-09-20 11:28|| 2008-09-20 11:28|| Front Page Top

#4 The housing payment from the Clinton era has come due and it's a $1 Trillion bill.

Posted by Darrell 2008-09-20 11:31|| 2008-09-20 11:31|| Front Page Top

#5 For the week, the S&P 500 is up 0.1% and the NASDAQ is up 0.3%

Posted by Mike N. 2008-09-20 13:16|| 2008-09-20 13:16|| Front Page Top

#6 Back in 1918, the pre-FDR federal government nationalized Wells Fargo. Not a whole lot of precedent for that. Somehow American capitalism survived.

Posted by Procopius2k 2008-09-20 16:28|| 2008-09-20 16:28|| Front Page Top

#7 Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2008-09-20 17:13|| 2008-09-20 17:13|| Front Page Top

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