{"id":394,"date":"2008-09-16T13:53:57","date_gmt":"2008-09-16T11:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=394"},"modified":"2008-09-16T16:12:35","modified_gmt":"2008-09-16T14:12:35","slug":"market-turmoil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Market Turmoil"},"content":{"rendered":"

First let’s agree that the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America was a horrible move by one or the other.\u00a0 If Merrill doesn’t understand its exposure, then BoA now has a\"\"n open exposure.\u00a0 Otherwise, why would they go running into the arms of BofA at such a turbulent point?\u00a0 It doesn’t bode particularly well for the industry either, when you have a maniac whacko<\/a> at the top of BofA.<\/p>\n

While President Bush sought to reassure investors that the market would recover, why would anyone believe that he has any understanding of what the market dynamics are at this point?\u00a0 Ben Bernanke clearly has misread the state of the economy from the outset of his stint as the Fed chairman, and he was the President’s best choice.\u00a0 The only person who seems to have made any sense of this at all is Secretary Paulson, who made it clear to Wall Street that the taxpayers cannot be expected to underwrite every company that would otherwise fail.\u00a0 But he has made no claims about understanding when and where the market will turn around.\u00a0 Good for him.<\/p>\n

All of this having been said, clearly the president had to say something, and what he said was the least offensive.\u00a0 Had he real credibility he perhaps could have had more of an impact on prices, but that day is long past (if it ever was).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First let’s agree that the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America was a horrible move by one or the other.\u00a0 If Merrill doesn’t understand its exposure, then BoA now has an open exposure.\u00a0 Otherwise, why would they go running into the arms of BofA at such a turbulent point?\u00a0 It doesn’t bode particularly … Continue reading “Market Turmoil”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[178,179,177],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-fed","tag-mergers","tag-turmoil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":405,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}