Apocalypse Now - Revisited

If you read Peston's picks blog this afternoon you will have seen this post which neatly summarised how bad a day it was for the world of finance. However he assumed, like most, that the $700 billion congressional bail out would not be voted out. We were all wrong. Its incredible but they rejected it. Stock Markets are now nose diving. Just think, the FTSE had fallen over five percent and closed before the vote - they had assumed the bail out would be voted through. So the Dow Jones cold (and is) falling by a lot more than that.

Shares in banks have been mullered. The virus has spread to Europe with Fortis being bailed out and there are problems in the middle east and Russia with huge losses being made in one form or another. Some "Oligarchs" have lost over $5 billion dollars each - I feel their pain.

Everyone is saying that the Wall Street crisis could spread to main street USA and then the worlds high street. They may well be right which is why its incredible that congress won't return to fix the mess until Thursday. Its just insane.

God alone knows what the FTSE will make of it all tomorrow. Once again all thoughts of taking out the pension have been shelved for hundreds of thousands, jobs are now under threat as well as much much more.

Surely after the next few days the bottom of the financial crisis will have been reached. Then we will have to deal with the wider fallout in the real economy. It looks like a mild downturn in Western world may now be uprated and we could be feeling the big chill.