The tidal wave of red ink began in Asia, moved through Europe during the early morning hours and grabbed a beach head in Canada by 9:30 am Toronto time.
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With Wall Street closed because of the commemoration of the Dr. Martin Luther King Day holiday, it was left to the rest of the world’s stock markets to face a massive day of negativity on their own.
Canada suffered its worst loss on the TSE since the days of the high tech meltdown of seven years ago, which turned such high flying companies as Nortel into tumbling scraps of paper. Monday saw the TSE surrendering some 605 points on the day, a continuation of a slide that began in earnest last week…
Yeah but by the end of the day it had clawed it’s way back to just under -128, not bad that considering before the trading day began many observers had predicted a collapse of over 1000 points.
Perhaps it was all that chatter in the early morning hours that convinced Bernake and the Fed to drop interest rates by 3/4 of a point, which seemed to bring some life to the financial stocks (which could use a bit of good news considering the malaise they’re in). That being said, Bernake is rather disliked by all the money boys and girls, who think he’s far to slow to act…
They aren’t really sure that his intervention today will have a long lasting effect…
What will be interesting to watch now is what happens in Asia and Europe again on Wednesday, will they take a breath or will the sell off in Asia continue, most of the talking heads today were saying that what the Dow Jones needed was a certain bottom, where there was a sense of finality to the current mess. That didn’t happen today, in fact, it was more like every other trading day in the last two weeks at the days end. The market declined a little bit more and the worries are still there about a recession and the various troubles that still dog it…
Should be interesting times for a while yet one would think…
