Uh-oh! Stock market open for 5 minutes and down 265

[Subdivisions]

points. This could be the major crash people have been talking about.

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. The reason seems to be related to the sub-prime mortgage fiasco

Concerns about the spillover effect of the subprime mortgage market are rattling investors' nerves again today after French bank BNP Paribas (BNPQY, news, msgs) said it is suspending trading in three hedge funds because it could not properly value them due to huge losses in the subprime market.

"The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of their quality or credit rating," BNP Paribas said in a statement this morning. "It is impossible to price assets in the funds because there is a lack of liquidity," BNP's spokesman Jonathan Mullen added.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/070809markets.aspx

[Warpy]

9. That and a dive in Home Depot

I guess reality is dawning on a lot of people. The boom supported by cheap credit is just about over. Even people who still have the ability to leverage debt are cutting back and thinking about how they're going to start paying it all off.

[Tesha]

10. I blame it all on the failure to enforce an English-only policy at the Exchanges

> "The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market
> segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it
> impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of
> their quality or credit rating,"

I blame it all on the failure to enforce an English-only policy
at the Exchanges. When you let people speak Greenspanish
(or is it Bernankese now?), stuff like this starts to happen.

If they'd learn to say "We loaned a shitload of money to a
bunch a shysters who sold us pigs-in-pokes and now we're
all paying for it", things might get a lot more real and
accurate.

Tesha

[madrchsod]

2. maybe the market will return to reality

that run up was all about greed not sound economic principals. let the losers cry in their cocktails

[WCGreen]

6. A lot of companies were buying up their own stock to increase

the earnings per share reports that drive a lot of the daily activity on the boards...

[DS1]

3. wake me when it goes a 1,000 in either direction

265 used to mean a lot, now it's a small percentage

[HereSince1628]

4. Steady now,

The increasing volatility of recent days looks to me a lot like questionable computer programs run by the big houses generating increasingly large oscillations. Time-delays with out-of-range forcing functions make these programs increasingly unreliable, and market reporting that seeks cause and effect in today's news are often way off base.

[monktonman]

5. Uh Oh....my boss is gonna loose some money.

Go ahead...flame on.

[leftchick]

7. I wonder if China's threats have anything to do with this?

among other factors?

[Double T]

8. china is also threatening to sell off U.S. Treasury Bonds, 1.33 trillion usd worth.

Mass exodus to foreign currencies might be possible.

http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2007/08/08/afx3997945.html

I'll save you a place in the soup line.:evilgrin:

[ChairmanAgnostic]

11. Hey, how about this? Let's put all SS funds into the market

that influx should be just the thing, eh? Privatize it, let brokers make even more billions in fees, and make every american a stockholder! Yeah, that's the ticket!

[C_U_L8R]

12. Bush news conference coming up

you know what that means.... get ready for another Bush plunge.

Bush is such a friggin' loser. Geeesh.

[wicket]

18. YUP! He opens his mouth and down the markets go

n/t

[fed-up]

13. Mortgage crunch hits Bay Area hard because of jumbo loans-SFGate

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/09/BU3IREG2E.DTL

Mortgage crunch hits Bay Area hard because of jumbo loans


Mortgage crunch hits Bay Area hard because of jumbo loans
Carolyn Said,Kelly Zito, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, August 9, 2007

Need a mortgage this month? It's going to be harder - and more expensive - to get one. In the past week, turmoil in the mortgage markets has caused increasing problems for home buyers in the Bay Area and around the nation.
snip

The story underscores how skittish Wall Street investors are causing a ripple effect that hurts multitudes of people buying or selling houses.
Simply put, less money is available for mortgages.
snip

The credit crunch comes at a time when Bay Area homes already are changing hands at their slowest rate in 12 years, and in some areas, sales are off by 40 percent.

snip

"There are people who could have qualified for a mortgage a month ago who can no longer get that mortgage," he said. "That means there will be fewer home sales or else people will have to buy less expensive homes. The practical impact is that some people will choose not to buy now. This is an additional negative factor on housing demand. It means home sales are likely to be weaker than we thought they would be just a few months ago."



Fast-changing mortgage market

In recent weeks, lending criteria for home mortgages have tightened considerably, making it much more difficult - and expensive - to borrow when purchasing or refinancing a house. Here's how and why these changes came about:
-- Housing prices, after enjoying a huge run-up over several years, began cooling.
-- Many borrowers who had taken out mortgages with low teaser rates could not make payments when those rates reset. Mortgage delinquencies and defaults - especially in the subprime market - began rising.
-- The secondary market on Wall Street for subprime and other risky home loans dried up. (Most home loans are repackaged and sold to investors.)
-- Faced with nowhere to sell those loans and get fresh capital, scores of lenders all over the United States closed, went bankrupt or stopped making certain loans.
-- Fewer of the remaining lenders are offering second mortgages, 100 percent financing, loans to people with poor credit, or "no-doc" loans that require little evidence of income or assets, although many lenders say they are still funding loans to those with good incomes, large down payments and strong credit scores.
-- Consumers will pay higher loan fees to compensate for the fact that the market for repackaged loans is skittish and many lenders must keep loans in their own portfolios.
What you can do

With the mortgage situation changing day by day, it's hard to say what's best for consumers. One thing all experts agree on: If you don't have to be in the market right now, it might be best to wait this crisis out. If that's not an option for you, there are still places to get advice. For instance:

[beberocks]

19. What is shocking is that you need a jumbo loan to buy a house in the Bay Area

Here in Sonoma County, you too can still get a little tiny
fixer-upper home on a postage-size lot for a mere $500K! I'm
not kidding--it got that bad. People are losing their shirts
because whatever equity they did put into their homes is
disappearing. Prices came down @15%, stabilized, and are now
heading down again. Foreclosures are at a 14 year high and are
only accelerating.

[spinbaby]

14. The piehole is about to speak

That always kills the market.

[spanone]

15. that's cause junior said the economy was doing great. EVERYONE knows he's a liar.

[spanone]

16. it's the damned french

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

Stocks Tumble as French Bank Reacts to Home Loan Worries

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/business/worldbusiness/10bank-web.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1186668765-UrThbLZOjL6D43atfkKiWA:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[tjwash]

17. Last week was the pump...this week is the dump.

There was a thread here on that, on the rising market. Too lazy to find it. But the consensus among most everyone that posted was it was pump and dump.