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CBS' financial correspondent Anthony Mason was in a sarcastic mood to end the week. "The market cannot go down tomorrow, can it?" he declared. "It is closed." The indicator he used to illustrate how much cash had been pulled out of mutual funds by investors was sales of home safes: increased by 75%: "Yes! We shall check on sales of mattresses next week," he joked.
NBC anchor Williams surrounded himself at the NYSE with financial news colleagues from CNBC, his network's sibling cable channel. Carl Quintanilla explained that the selloff had been so extreme because "hedge fund and mutual fund clients want their money back" so fund managers were forced to raise cash "by selling stocks they might otherwise keep--McDonalds, IBM, ExxonMobil." CNBC's Maria Bartiromo reflected a mood where "everybody is looking for leadership; everyone is nervous." And CNBC economist Steve Liesman (at the tail of the Bartiromo videostream) pointed to the policy solutions that may emerge from the Treasury Department over the weekend.
Both CBS and ABC decided to go behind the scenes as Friday's wild stock trading proceeded. At one point the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen 683 points; at another it had bounced 955 points. ABC's Brianna Golodryga hung out with floor trader Jason Weisberg of Seaport Securities. "Let capitalism take over," he insisted, ignoring the television screen on which President George Bush tried to address the crisis. CBS' Michelle Miller was at Smith Barney, where she found retail brokers less interested in making money for their clients, more "old-fashioned hand holding." Investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders of the brokerage house Charles Schwab told ABC anchor Charles Gibson that the day's swings were "unprecedented," more volatile than on the day of the crash in 1987. She predicted that any rally in response would be "the mirror image"--"incredibly fierce and incredibly sharp."
CNBC's Quintanilla warned of long term effects from the financial crisis. The impact of the credit crunch on the macro economy might produce "a bleak decade" of stagnation, like the '30s or the '70s. Secondly, the babyboom generation, seeing their retirement accounts so badly devalued, might "leave the market for good, creating less demand for stocks and making them less lucrative investments for years to come." The result of a "harrowing and historic week," ABC's Betsy Stark told us, is a "loss of wealth that has been devastating." With $2.5tr subtracted from market capital in less than two weeks, stocks are worth no more now than they were ten years ago, in 1998.
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