Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Could it be Thursday?

Some thoughts:

There seems to be a lot of coordination between England and the US for the short ban last month. Notice that Canada wasn’t even involved in that initially.


Fed announces that they are going to buy commercial paper. PIMCO’s Bill Gross asked (told?) the Fed to do so yesterday in his monthly must-read newsletter. What else did he ask (tell?): set up a clearinghouse for transactions and do a 100 pt cut, preferably coordinated with other central banks. Remember he asked for a Fannie bailout (he got it) and he asked for a “new balance sheet” (ie the Treasury) to buy us out of this mess (he got that too).


Bank of Australia cut 100 today. There was no coordination but it is unlikely that Fed would want to team up with a lightweight like Australia (or Canada) here. They are going with the A team of BoE and/or ECB.

BoE is not going to go before Thursday since it is unlikely to move up its meeting barring a crash
BoE will need to cut more than the 50 expected; therefore 75 is likely (100 can’t be ruled out but it may look a little desperate).

BoC, Fed and Bank of New Zealand have meeting at the end of October (an eternity in this market). I think they join for 75 each.

ECB is the toughest call since they are inflation hawks but their meeting is in November. I think they go along for 25

Australia, which cut 100 today, could even go along for symbolism for 25 but that may be asking too much.

Summary: BoE, BoC, Fed, BoNz cut 75 on Thursday. Maybe ECB and Australia cut 25..

Addendum: Wednesday 8am (Oct 8th): Looks like it happened today! 50 pts across the board. Looks like after Black Tuesday, they couldn't wait any longer ...

Addendum #2 Wednesday night: I guess they felt that they didn't have the luxury to wait another day, although it was a horrible close (yet again)...

I have tried a few very small long positions and got stopped out. The volatility is killer. I have to remind myself to stay in cash.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You were close! I suppose they weren't quite so worried about looking desperate as we would hae thought. Markets had an initial jump, and down for the DOW and TSX so far.

Interesting....