Sure doesn't take much to make them skittish:
Across the Atlantic, the U.S. stock market had plummeted. In only 15 minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen about 1,000 points, razing the stock prices of some of America’s biggest companies to a single penny. It would later be known as the “flash crash” and would be chalked up to strange technical factors. But in the heat of the moment, it flashed a different sort of danger. To the leaders of the European Central Bank who made up the Governing Council, who that very day had dismissed risks to their financial system, the crash seemed a striking referendum on what they had done---or rather, not done.
So they saved the world from a total financial meltdown. But it begs the question that if our global economy is so fragile that it can be brought down by a fucking software glitch, wouldn't that suggest some underlying structural weaknesses (inflated equities bubbles, excessive derivatives exposures) that trillion-dollar asset purchases are only papering over and not really correcting? Seems to me the proof is in the aftermath: it's nearly three years later now, and despite their dumping massive amounts of liquidity into the global banking system, that same global banking system is still basically illiquid.
---Baron V
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