Weekly Wrap: Should we be worried about the markets?
Kai Ryssdal talks with Felix Salmon from Reuters and Cardiff Garcia from FT Alphaville about whether investors should be panicking — if another 2008 is upon us.
On whether the markets are panicking:
Felix Salmon: Do you see anybody panicking? I see people bringing prices down; I don’t see blood running in the streets. I see people losing money, which is perfectly normal in the markets. And it seems to be happening a little bit more quickly than it used to — it used to take, you know, a few days for stocks to drop 5 percent; now you can do it in an afternoon. But that’s I think just largely a function of the fact that we’re in the middle of August and all the traders are on holiday and they just aren’t in there with the kind of numbers, the kind of liquidity that we normally have.
On the volatility:
Cardiff Garcia: I do agree with Felix that this is not 2008. Unfortunately, ‘not 2008’ isn’t a slogan that inspires confidence in everybody. Look, there’s been a lot going on and we can point to what’s happening in Europe and the European banks there. Also we’re had a spate of really bad economic numbers in both Europe and the U.S. I mean, the fundamental problem right now is that people are very uncertain about what’s happening in the economy and a lot of it’s driven by both economic realities and also by some of these manufactued political crises that we just had in the U.S. because we’ve been focused on the wrong thing for so long.
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