Breaking News On The Latest Financial Meltdown

The Worlds Stock Market was in financial meltdown this monday morning, after a wave of panic selling which started late friday afternoon, continued to show no signs of stopping. On the trading floor of the Dutch Second Bank, traders who normally execute buy orders, sit by their phones, which have yet to have ring since the crisis started. On the other side, where the sell orders are exectued, it is bedlam as brokers clammer over each other and runners fail to handle the large volume of calls - a scene repeated across investment banks around the globe.

620 Billion has been wiped off the Dow Jones, 74 Billion from the FTSE and they continue to plummet. Looses not seen to this extent since the black monday of 1987, though experts have ruled making direct comparisons as the situation is vastly different.

It will be many days, if not weeks before the full impact of this crash will be felt. The government in response today issued an emergency 50 billion government bond in the hope to turn the tide of selling into buying.Many will question however, is it too little, too late ?

It seems also, we have learnt little from the recent sub prime market crash. As details of the of the current crisis, becomes more apparent:

Historically, the price of treacle has been linked with that of tuppeny rice, with approxiamatley three pounds of Tuppeny rice being worth one pound of treacle. This morning, the price stands at half a pound of tuppeny rice, half pound of treacle.

The cause being the complex financial instrument which is the Weasel. The Weasel was introduced initially as a safeguard investment, in the case of failed rice crop. Many saw an easy profit in these Weasels and they were sold and exchanged across the market without regulation. Some institutes, such as the now collapsed Barkmen Brothers took on so many other peoples weasels, they literarily "popped"

And that is how, when in years to come, when we ask what happened to our pensions and saving, is the only response we can give, as it the way, the money went.



The above was done for an exercise set by the Leeds Writing Group which was to take a verse of a song and write it as a serious bit of journalism. I had in mind a news broadcast when writing this, so its probably a bit comma heavy. If stories in finance are your thing, here is a piece I wrote a looong time ago, entitled Investment Bank Wo's