Just heard a gal who works on the Street on the phone with Glenn Beck. She says the Fed is doing research into the Depression, what might have been done to stop or minimze the effects.
This is getting ugly- the panic psychology is nearly impossible to stop.
The problem is that in fact you CAN take steps to make sure the markets don’t collapse today.
What you can’t do is prevent the sun from rising on a new day tomorrow.
And that is the essential flaw behind the moves the government/Fed is taking now. Ultimately, nothing they do will be enough to budge the immovable object - the enormous proportion of our apparent wealth which was created through inflation, and masked by manipulation of the CPI and currency devaluation.
People who bought into a market with unsustainable borrowing levels priced in are going to get hosed, and the only way of mitigating that is to spread the hurt to people who didn’t.