We haven’t (yet) had a nearly 10% single day stock market loss in our recent troubles. Japan has. Reuters:

Japanese share prices plunged 9.38 percent Wednesday, the biggest loss in more than two decades as panic-selling erupted over the global financial crisis. The Tokyo Stock Exchange’s benchmark Nikkei-225 index dived 952.58 points to end at 9,203.32. At one point the index was down 9.81 percent. It was the worst day for Asia’s largest bourse since a 14.9 percent plunge on October 20, 1987 in the wake of the “Black Monday” crash in the United States.

Indonesia is down 21% for the week, by the way. In response, Steve Roach, Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, said: “What is needed here is a massive coordinated move, and need to do it in the next few days or it’s too late.” It’s hard to see that the coordinated but small 50 bp cut in interest rates by most of the world’s major central banks will be enough to halt this carnage.

Question: are we approaching the time when we’ll need a theme song for this moment?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.