Will the EU Bailout Save the Market? Be Careful What You Wish For


The endless and increasingly desperate rumors of an EU bailout was enough to juice the stock market higher today. The Dow closed up over 270 points. To me, this has ominous parallels to the October 2008 Tarp bailout of the banks. If you remember the market initially dropped when the US House of Criminals Representatives failed to surrender complete sovereignty to the major banks. A few days later, the big banks made the right payments to the right people to get the TARP bailout approved despite public opposition to the plan. Anyway, the key takeaway was that the stock market immediately began to crash after the passing of the TARP bill. Instead of restoring confidence, the bailout bill spooked the market. People started to freak out that the US financial system must be in deep trouble if it needed $700 billion in additional capital. After all, every Government official and Fed member had assured the market that "the fundamentals remain sound" and other lies.

Below is a chart of the S&P 500 between October 3, 2008 (when the TARP bill was approved) and October 17,2008. The market crashed 22% despite the bailout. The lesson from 2008 was that bailouts don't prevent markets from crashing. Are we repeating history?


Black Swan Insights

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