How Low Can You Go?

Recent posts on Sweet Digs Seattle:

• Seattle: One Hard Place to Sell a Home
• Raspberry Iced Reasons to Live in Bellevue
• Desperate is a Relative Term
• Million Dollar Digs on Capitol Hill
• Senate Bails the Sinking Ship
• Homestrology: What your sign says about your surroundings
• Sharing Time: Are You Having Difficulty Getting a Loan?
• Least to Most Expensive Equation
• A Neighborhood Necessity: Are you registered to vote?
• A Street on the Brink: Calling All Urban Pioneers
• Quadrant Homes Cuts Jobs

Stock prices around the world tumble despite bank bail-outs in the US and abroad. Fears of slower global economic growth are creating a crisis and investors don’t seem to have high confidence in the ability of legislators to stem the tide. Currently the Dow is hovering around where it was in 2004. From BBC News:

This was despite a $700bn (£398bn) US bank bail-out being passed late last week, and efforts by several European countries including Germany and Denmark to boost confidence in their banks.

“The fact is people are scared and the only thing they’re doing is selling,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.

“Investors are cleaning out portfolios and getting rid of everything because nothing seems to be working.”

• London’s FTSE 100 index down 7.85%
• Germany’s Dax index down 7.39%
• France’s Cac-40 index down 9.04%
• Wall Street’s Dow Jones index down 4.05%
• Japan’s Nikkei index down 4.3%
• Indonesian market down 10%
• Brazil market down 10%
• Russia market down 15%. Russia’s RTS index down 19.1% 

With home prices down and stock prices down, the only upshot is that oil prices are down too! Hurray!