Wall Street woes
By V Anantha Nageswaran
In the last few months, financial markets had got used to the idea of the authorities conjuring up some solutions to problems in the US financial industry over the weekend and announcing it on Monday morning (Asian time) in time for the Asian stocks to open higher. This routine worked initially but when problems did not go away, the impact became rather muted.
Unfortunately for Lehman Brothers such a weekend solution did not arrive. Late on Sunday evening in the US it announced that it was going to declare bankruptcy. Wanting to avoid that fate, Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America. Some called it tectonic shifts on Wall Street. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve said that America was facing once-in-a-century financial crisis. He should know better because he played no small role in creating it. Continue reading “By Invitation: Buy lots of mattresses”