The SEC has banned short-selling on financial stocks. The Treasury has guaranteed money market funds and is cooking up plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy distressed assets and save troubled banks. The market has rebounded huge, taking back all of this month's losses.

So are we all clear??

Hardly.

I think in the short-term, the moves have bought the financial system time to gather its senses, to take a breath. That's a good thing, and clearly the ban on short selling is doing a lot to move prices higher (I'm going to write about the numerous, potentially devastating long-term ramifications of all these decisions in a following post).

Something needed to be done. We took out our previous lows and got that panicky sell-off I talked about in an earlier post. The potential for blood on the streets (Main Street as well as Wall Street) was very real. A functioning economy ultimately rests on people's confidence in it, and widespread panic can cripple the health of such a system to the point where it takes years to recover.

But even if you stabilize the system with these moves, you're still going to be faced with most of the same issues: A moribund housing market, a stretched-to-the-limit consumer, a weakening job market, a credit crunch, a global slowdown. It will take time and a lot of pain to resolve these issues. Anything we do will at best ease some of that pain, while there's a very real risk we end up doing something to make the problems last longer than they otherwise would.

In sum, the government may have just put a floor in the market with these moves, and at least temporarily prevented a disastrous widespread panic that could have led to another Great Depression.

But I also think we've seen most of the short-term stock price gains we're going to see (maybe we see another 5-10%).

And the medium-term future for the economy AND the market still doesn't look particularly bright. We're going to be stuck in this economic morass for some time to come, and the market will continue to reflect that reality.