The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Deadman's picture

    Happy Weekend!! ...

    By Deadman on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 3:18pm | Business

    This is a fun chart to look at - thanks to http://dshort.com. Assuming this market meltdown proves to be a reasonable fascimilie of the big, bad one, as I believe it will, we have a long way down yet to go.

    We are so overdue for a decent-sized short-term relief rally, I think we may get one as soon as next week, but I bet when all is said and done we get much closer to that down 89% total.

    The Four Bad Bears - Dshort.com

    Topics: 
    Business

    Comments

    Seen this chart.  It's not good.


    by DF on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 6:20pm

    It's Friday and the markets have closed. Every weekend now, I wait for the Obama team to rip off several Band-Aids at once. Seize some banks, announce they'll hold GM's hand as they stroll into bankruptcy -- something.

    I know the task forces are meeting stakeholders, the stress tests are being applied, and you don't want to precipitate any worse panic. But time really is of the essence here; things are not getting better on their own. Bite the bullet -- make that the mouthful of bullets. If not this weekend, then the next! The markets will dip, but they're going to dip whatever you do. And maybe Deadman is wrong about where we bottom out. 


    by acanuck on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 6:54pm

    It's toasted kids. Forget the bail-outs, stimulus packages, bank manuevers. The risk always was that this financial shit connected with the real economy. Because at that level, we had become brutally vulnerable. Any shock could knock us sideways, but an extended and comprehensive one? Forget it. Housing/construction is a massive share of our economy, and it's never springing back to where it was. Autos, same. Then people curtail travel, meals, and those segments fall. So what could POSSIBLY be big enough to revive us? Nothing. And I work in Green Jobs, which is one hopeful part of the picture - but not nearly large enough.

    The real questions now are how to restructure WITHIN an economy that runs at 10%-20% lower levels of GDP. We're gonna need that amount for people to handle debt, rebuild savings, rebalance the trade deficit, pay off future taxes, etc. We're all still arguing over ways to somehow make the economy "come back." Futile. When you see GE on the rocks, if that doesn't signal that we're in some complete collapse, I don't know what does.


    by quinn esq on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 11:35am

    I tend to agree with this assessment although I view the Stimulus through that lense - it is meant to stabalize things at a level that most people are scared of. Most people being the market. The entirity of the Bush Bubble has been erased and hopefully the government can create a new focus through the energy paradigm; Obama is still playing long ball. There are more moves to be made, but most of them are going to be focused forward rather than a short term patch. Adjustment is necessary, and we will be a nation that is finding itself again.

     

    We need a new Frontier, and if you look at how Obama frames it, he always builds a challenge into his policies - a focus on the energy frontier with the rest of the world in the race. He cannot and should not be developing some specific goal for the economy other than to create an environment of employment, education, and health. The rest is up to the winds of time.


    by elliottness on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 3:34pm