Flutterby™! : Dow below 10k 2008-10-06 14:49:58.796598+00

Dow below 10k

2008-10-06 14:49:58.796598+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Dow industrials plunge 500 amid global sell-off:

Investors are realizing that the Bush administration's $700 billion rescue plan won't work ...

Uh, it took 'em to today? To be fair, the sentence continues:

... quickly to unfreeze credit markets, and many banks are still having difficulty gaining access to cash.

But still, wasn't that the point of the plan?

And it looks like the Obama campaign has just decided to get serious about this whole campaigning thing, http://www.keatingeconomics.com/ promises a "full documentary available at 12 PM Eastern", but currently has a lot of text looking into John McCain's role as one of the Keating 5.

...And at market close, the Dow is back up to right around 10,000, down about 350. OMFG EVERYBODY PANIC!

Well, I believe the fundamentals support about 8500, so I'm expecting a few more days of this.

Laughing.. It's going to be a Yo-Yo for a while. Forget "Day" trading.. Think: "Minute" Trading.

Late in the day I heard that the Paulson plan is going to be about a month before they start buying up the mortgage paper. This is going to get pretty crazy.

Even a finance idiot like myself can comprehend enough to believe it's the truth when four separate sources say that increasing the amount of liquidity in the system isn't enough; it's now a trust issue. Whether the bailout bill will steady nerves sufficiently to restore trust is an interesting question - certainly its ANNOUNCEMENT did not; as radix notes, it will be a while before the money actually begins flowing.

Dan, it's not like Obama hasn't been working damned hard on the ground. I read an article recently (I forget the source or I'd link it) comparing his field machine to McCain's, by someone who went to various states and visited both, and there was no comparison. Obama is working the trenches, not the pulpit. It may yet pay off - witness Michigan, and The Economist this week says that even Florida is not a foregone conclusion for McCain at this point. I am allowing myself some small sliver of hope at this point.

I'm happy Obama has mostly tried to stay out of the mud game, especially recently because it has made him look focused on the economy instead. (McCain choosing yesterday to renew character attacks has already backfired on him - bad timing, dude.) The Keating site is, to my mind, an example of the way to *properly* expose the faults of your opponent - an expose, written with facts and with conviction, rather than empty mudslinging and innuendo.

Five Thirty Eight ( http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ ) has had a couple of postings about the differences in the field campaign.

Todd, it's been a trust issue for a while, nobody trusts the underlying accounting to say that you're good for the money, in a fair world this'd be limited to people who have large quantities of real estate assets, but right now it's anyone, because nobody knows what the underlying real estate assets are. I'd guess the billions-for-Greenwich plan won't restore confidence, at least not to the extent that the politicians have been trying to sell it, because it doesn't do enough to provide an underlying valuation, it just says "trust us, there's a bottom here somewhere. Really.".

On the Obama campaign, yeah, I've been impressed by their strategic thinking, they do a very good job of taking the high ground, and then pointing out their opponent brought a knife to a gun fight when things get dirty. I was less impressed by the Keating 5 documentary, though I liked the written stuff and the general tactic, but I also have to keep in mind that I'm not the market sample. I'll vote for Obama only if it looks like California will be close, and he'd have to do something like eviscerate kittens in front of orophans on live television for me to think he's worse than McCain.