Posted 6:30 AM by steve

Perhaps it is a sign of the reporter's thinking, as writing that stocks dropped to their lowest levels since 1987 "...amid deepening questions about whether governments around the world are being forceful enough in combating the economic crisis" completely ignores the possibility that governments are being quite forceful... but in a way the markets very much disapprove of.

A neutral observer might be inclined to wonder just what else the government is supposed to do: the United States government has thrown hundreds of billions of dollars into troubled financial firms... they've committed hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars to a stimulus that, according to its backers, is supposed to get the economy rolling again. And while perhaps not to the same degree, governments around the world have taken similar steps rescuing ailing companies and injecting dollars into their economies.

I don't think the markets are crashing because investors like the steps that are being taken but want more of what Obama is doing; adding $50 billion here or $50 billion there to this or that bailout or aspect of Obama's stimulus plan is NOT going to make a difference to investors.

It's not the dollar amounts that bother investors, it is the substance of what Obama is doing that has freaked people out. They don't like the contents of Obama's stimulus plan. They don't like his plan to raise taxes on productive Americans. They don't like his plans to start moving towards socialized medicine. They don't like his plan to have government inject itself even further into business. They don't like his spending. They just don't like what he is doing.

And they've expressed this concern since it was clear he was going to win in November as the market has been on a dive since well before he took office. Investors have looked beyond the glib talk and do not like what they see... and their actions in selling off their holdings and refusing to put the tons of cash they're holding back into the market speaks volumes about their concerns. It isn't that they think Obama needs to do more, they wish he would do less, a whole lot less.