Nikkei now down 382.07 (3.49%), gonna be a rough day and who is CNN going to blame now?
ttp://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/wei_region3.html
Everything is red. Scary. Checking the Asian markets before one goes to bed doesn’t exactly make for a restful sleep. :(
That should be http:// ... Didn't include the "h"
DEBKAfile Special Report
October 5, 2008, 10:58 PM (GMT+02:00)
Stocks and bonds dropped 6-10 percent in the week’s first day of trading Sunday, Oct. 5, at the Tel Aviv stock exchange, 23 percent in the last month. Major corporations were targeted, exposing many jobs at risk and cutting deep into savings and pension funds programs.
The clamor grew Sunday for the caretaker government to intervene and provide a safety net for savings accounts and pension funds. The anodyne statements issuing from prime minister Ehud Olmert and finance minister Ronnie Bar-On pointing up how sound the Israeli financial and banking system is compared with the United States, have fallen on deaf ears.
Investors are fleeing in a panic and showing their lack of faith in the government, central bank and the effectiveness of the US bail-out as a panacea for the financial ills spreading out from New York..
Bonds of the country’s biggest group’s took the heaviest losses Sunday: Lev Leviev’s Africa Israel, the Eliezer Fishman group and Yitzhak Tshuva’s Delek Real Estate, with dire effect on their subsidiaries and jobs. The TA-25 Index dropped 6.00 percent to 796.37 points and the TA-100 Index fell by 6.13%, to 714.26 points. The Tel-Tech Index declined by 8.27% and the Real Estate Index plummeted by 9.37.
Secretary General of the Histadrut Trade Unions Federation, Ofer Eini, spoke up for the first time Sunday to convey a hard message. The progressive collapse of the job market has become unstoppable, he said. At the very least, the government must guarantee pension funds so that when workers are fired or retire, their life’s savings are protected. The trade unions leader called on the finance minister to top up the state budget to rescue diminishing individual savings and investments."
sw