A new 'Black Monday'?

Not that I'm too big on the idea of terming days 'black' to connote negativity but that is another post...

Point is, it has been a pretty bad Monday for the financial markets and it seems to be continuing a trend of gloomy Mondays.

After all the Wall Street crash of 1929 which kick-started the Great Depression, was on a Monday. So was the 'Black Monday' of the October 1987 global stock crash. For that matter so were the two previous major financial panics (well the lowlights) this year- Monday, January 21 and Monday, September 15- two weeks ago when Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch failed.

So Mondays aren't so hot and today is taking its place in the grim Monday annals of history.

Today's rejection of the US$700 billion bailout plan spurred a panicked 777-point drop on the Dow Jones industrial index - the largest ever single point drop in history.

Things are bad. They are very bad. And the bad news is that really no matter who becomes US president after Bush the buffoon has rode off into the sunset with the title of Worst. President.Ever. they don't have the power to fix the financial crisis.

Truth be told, the American presidency is a constitutionally weak post - deliberately created that way by that country's founding fathers to avoid monarchical-type power being placed in the hands of one person since that was what the whole war of 'Independence' was about.

Newsweek has a good article about it, explaining why the prez can't really fix things. The most power a president actually has is to inspire a mood of confidence among his countrymen, so that consumer confidence will be boosted once again.

See it's all a poker game. It's all balancing on confidence and everyone having or at least pretending they have the confidence to maintain things and leverage and risk massive amounts of money. But everyone has started losing confidence in everyone else and it is creating a domino effect that these fools seem unable to stop, even though they know it is based on their being confident.