Lots of markets are crashing to day. From Marco Man….
Later in life, Mr. Eliot repudiated the ending to “The Hollow Men”, quoted above. One would have to presume that if he were alive today and a practitioner of financial poetry, he would be equally averse to claiming that the world would end with a whimper.
Or so we’d have to judge by price action today, wherein all things risky are tracing out an Icarus-like descent, and the only thing preventing a Black Monday-style crash in the US today is that the market is closed. This month has already been a testing one, and on the basis of today’s gruesome start that trend appears set to continue.
He has a graph at his site that demonstrates what he means by “Icarus-like descent.” Naked Capitalism has charts showing the drop of Japan’s stock market.
A bad day for German banking: WestLB, the latest victim of the subprime credit crisis, has reported a 2007 loss of €1 billion. Meanwhile, stock prices are tanking amid fears of global recession. Banking stocks are among the worst hit.
From The Economist…..
IT APPEARS to be an old-fashioned case of risk aversion. Stockmarkets are plunging (the FTSE 100 was down more than 300 points, or 5% just after noon in London, on Monday January 21st), commodity prices are dropping and investors are flocking to the safety of government bonds and currencies like the Swiss franc and yen. Speculative bonds now yield seven percentage points more than US Treasuries, the highest spread since April 2003.