

Brian Williams on Wall Street's Free Fall - david927
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRNrl-858qA

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jsz0
After the subprime debacle I can't look at any financial institutions or
markets as being anything other than a facade for what's really going on
behind the scenes. Was the whole event just rigged to make some rich and
powerful person even richer? Maybe some trader was approached with this
mistake scenario. Billions in wealth is created and destroyed by one person
pressing a _b_ or an _m_ on a keyboard. I'm not really comfortable with our
entire society being dependent on the actions of elite traders and back room
deals.

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brown9-2
Am I the only one who finds the coverage of this completely overblown?

Yes there are significant problems in Greece, Portugal, Europe, and the US.

But why do we continue to place more and more importance on the intra-day
movements of the Dow Index, when in the long run, the day-to-day is
irrelevant?

~~~
blantonl
You don't make or lose money in the market based on the daily start and finish
prices in the market, you make or lose money when you execute your trade,
which happens _intra-day_. The market might have "only" been down 347 points
at the end of the session, but _many_ investors bought or sold investments
when the market was down 990 points.

Coverage of this is not overblown, yesterdays events were extremely rare and
quite damaging for many investors who were forced to sell at the low _intra-
day_ points in the market (via stop-losses and margin calls)

~~~
loumf
Even so, Brian Williams compared it to 9/11 -- that's pretty over the top.

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jonknee
He compared the feeling of it--no one knowing what's happening, fear/chaos,
etc. Not the after-effects.

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ruang
Easy fix - put in more effective circuit breakers. Right now they are limited
to the indices and certain hours of the day.
<http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CircuitBreaker>

Make it so circuit breakers apply to individual stocks, and for all hours of
the trading day.

For example, commodities have a 'limit up':
<http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/limitup.asp>

~~~
fr0sty
easy, and perhaps a bit naive. it is possible you may cause more market
turmoil by halting only certain stocks which would push volume into ETFs,
futures, options, and other stocks in the same sectors.

The markets are very interconnected and very fast moving. 'simple' solutions
rarely work.

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david927
With all this disinformation about a 'b' instead of an 'm', I think Brian did
a great service last night. This is about entire countries on the verge of
defaulting. That's huge. The drop yesterday was huge and it only portends
what's still to come.

This information has to get out. Anyone in the market because "it always goes
up over time," needs to get out, now.

~~~
joubert
Buy good companies when everyone's running away

~~~
goatforce5
"Baron Rothschild, an 18th century British nobleman and member of the
Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying that "The time to buy is
when there's blood in the streets.""

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-
theory/08/con...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-
theory/08/contrarian-investing.asp)

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languagedream
Shouldn't a network news anchor be more calm?

~~~
drusenko
i agree, that's absolutely irresponsible. way to personally inject a
significant amount of fear into the market where there was none necessarily
called for.

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magoghm
It sounds like he's saying that the crash was caused by a video from Greece.
That's rather hard to believe.

~~~
sh4na
I believe his point was that the effect of looking at videos from Greece while
imagining the consequences for the economies in the rest of Europe and those
consequences spreading to the US while suddenly watching the Dow fall 1000
points was harrowing, to say the least. Not that one was caused by the other,
but that it a lot to take in in one go.

I'm sure watching the Dow fall like that while watching videos from Greece was
scary, especially to people that are already too aware of the fragile state of
the world economy.

