Britain's blue chip companies lost £60 billion in value in just a few minutes today as investor confidence crumbled and political leaders battled to avert the threat of recession.
Sounds like that bailout plan that was going to fix everything really worked, didn't it?
No stock was in positive territory on the UK benchmark index but banks were again among the biggest fallers, with Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS down between 11.8 and 15.5 per cent. HBOS was marked down partly on fears that the Treasury could move towards a taxpayer-funded recapitalisation of British banks – effectively a partial nationalisation – which could reopen its takeover by Lloyds TSB.
I can remember as early as 2000, looking at the Gorgon and his hubristic (is that a word?) claims and saying that when this little lot goes pop, it's going to be special. I must admit, though, I am a little surprised that the world has decided to join the party, but then I wasn't looking outside my own little corner of misery. If anything, I was more expecting the rest of the world to be standing around laughing and pointing at our sorry arses. But France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Iceland ... all are seriously fucked over. That ban on shorting has really worked out well, too!
Despite weeks of huge liquidity injection by central banks, money markets remained tight, reflecting deep reluctance by banks to lend to each other. “We have a seriously weak and fear-driven market on our hands,” said Tom Hougaard, the chief market strategist at City Index.
Yep. All caused by a combination of over-invasive regulation of the wrong things, completely toothless watchdogs to look after customers' interests and greed and moral hazard. And how is everyone proposing to fix this? Well, it's hard to gaze into the future, but my best guess is there will be lots more regulation of the wrong things; no beefing up of consumer watchdogs; and moral hazard is apparently being rewarded, so I'm sure there will be more of that.
Fucking bargain, eh? Good thing we have serious people for serious times.
A serious person, earlier
Cunts.
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