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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tommaso who wrote (135186)	7/20/2008 11:16:26 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 306849

Feds fight the fear factor But it's hard to see how attempts to shore up investor confidence can work for long while home prices keep falling. Efforts to maintain confidence in the financial sector won't prevent investors from scrutinizing the balance sheets of banks and brokerages. money.cnn.com NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Washington is tying itself in knots trying to shore up confidence in the financial sector. In just the past week, officials have moved to curtail short-selling, promised a crack down on market rumormongers and cooked up a rescue plan for beleaguered mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - while taking pains to argue that the institutions are sound even as investors dump shares. Trouble is, banks and brokerage stocks aren't being done in by a cabal of bad guys on trading desks. Bankers who made increasingly reckless bets on the housing market engineered this train wreck. And the damage they wrought on their companies' balance sheets is going to take time - and a lot more pain - to undo.