James carville, Bill Clinton's political adviser, once said he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market so that he could "intimidate everybody". This week the stockmarkets showed they could make pretty good use of the knuckle-duster, too. It did not even take a fall on Wall Street to spook the Federal Reserve into slashing interest rates by three-quarters of a point on January 22nd; the American markets were closed for a public holiday the day before. The Fed reacted instead to a slump in global markets and the prospect, indicated by the futures market, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would drop by more than 500 points at the opening. Small wonder that traders are now talking about the "Bernanke put" - the idea that, like his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman will ride to the rescue whenever markets falter.
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