ALL indicators seem to point to passage of the Treasury's Wall Street rescue plan today, and yet the financial world does not seem much cheered. As vital as the bail-out plan may be, it increasingly looks to be a stop-gap or half-measure when set against the scope of the crisis. The clouds are simply gathering more quickly and thickly than many had anticipated. Here's Felix Salmon : The S&P 500 closed [Thursday] at its lowest end-of-day level since October 2004 -- lower, even, than it closed on Monday... Here's a datapoint to underscore just how bad things are: the markets plunged on a day when the WSJ had a front-page story about how the Fed is considering even more rate cuts -- the kind of story which is normally good for at least a couple of hundred points on the Dow. But this crisis has clearly moved far past the point at which monetary policy alone can turn things around. The only real question is whether monetary policy and fiscal policy and TARP and regulatory reform and closer cooperation between global authorities can turn things around. Right now, I'd put that at about p=0.4. Here's Paul Krugman : Double plus ungood news on multiple fronts this morning. The credit crunch is getting worse: LIBOR jumped again, the TED spread is at a new record. Bad news on employment : payrolls down 159,000, average work week down, official unemployment rate flat at 6.1 percent but broad measure (U6) up from 10.7 to 11. We are going over the e ...
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