Phew! No country wants to be looked upon as holding back on the global rescue. At first glance, it looks like the skittish Eurozone countries who seemed to want to craft their own individual rescue plans, are now on board with loan guarantee facilities. The US and UK also announced policy.

This is looking positive but I haven't had the chance to review. Stay tuned, I'll return later this evening...

UPDATE 10/12/08 9:15pm PDT... although Asian markets and market futures are up, many CNBC' pundits this evening believe  investors will sell into this rally.

        

The world wants to see a credit market solution hat trick from the G7 meetings, but they just amped up their word without a backbone plan... Today's news excerpts:

Bloomberg:

"The current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action,'' the finance ministers and central bankers said in a statement after talks in Washington yesterday. They pledged to "take all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets'' without detailing how that would be accomplished.

Marketwatch:

Financial policymakers from 180 nations around the world are united in their resolve to tackle the financial crisis, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, head of the International Monetary Fund's policy committee, said Saturday. The International Monetary Fund endorsed the plan of action released Friday by the Group of Seven nations, he said. "The crisis is global, so the solution has to be global," he said. "No tools will be spared."

And what does this MarketWatch commentator think?

Emergency! Emergency! Let's hurry up and do >>>>>>>>...NOTHING.

3 Weeks ago Hank came to congress with his hair on fire declaring the Lenders had all swallowed wmds and we had to do something really quickly. He had the answer scratched on 3 sheets of tissue paper. Give me 700b and get out of my way. The congress asked can you explain. The media including this site screamed don't ask questions it's an Emergency! Just rubberstamp and get out of the way or the sky will fall. The congress rushed added some options, calculated a bit and then gave Hank his wad of cash. And Voila....the market crashed!

What did Hank do? Did he go into action? Did he start saving banks and rescue the economy? No. What's the rush? Need to build a bureaucracy to run things. Hire some Goldman cronies. And then there is that matter of figuring out what inverse up side down Dutch auctions are. Didn't have time before going to congress to figure that out. And of course we do not want to force banks to cough up for too low a price. Got 700 big ones to spend. This all takes time. Don't want to hurry things.

So it turned out for Hank the Emergency was no big rush. Things take time. And as for the markets....oh they really crashed.

So here we are with another emergency meeting. The IMF, the G7 and after meeting they issue some paper saying things are really bad and we really should do something. Do they have a PLAN? No. Do they offer quick action? NO. Do they appear to even understand the scope of the problem? Do not think so.

I think this is the general perception now... loss of confidence in our economic and political leaders to be able to do anything at all. This is the cause of the credit crisis and the market crash.

        

Simply put, the new definition of capitulation is not when the investor has given up all hope and is selling off all its equity, it is when the global Central Banks and the Fed simply throw up their hands and pronounce this is a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe, and will throw in the kitchen sink.

Investors now need to fear selling stocks and missing out in the rubber band snap of an oversold market that could potentially happen with a unified global commitment to halt the bloodletting.

What can the global Central Banks do?

1. G-7 meetings start tomorrow - they can blanket guarantee ALL interbank lending. That means banks can lend to other banks and be assured their money is safe in sudden bankruptcy. Radical, but everybody antes up to make sure their poker game doesn't collapse.
   
2. Take bold action. Yes, rate cuts may not be the panacea at all, but yesterday's chickensh*t 50bp rate cut gave investors the impression the global Central Banks were clueless. Today, the Fed's plan to inject capital into the banks through equity purchase had no effect in a near-record loss day. The continuing market crash mirrors a call for more help. Drop rates even more as a symbolic move to capitulation as defined above. If the European finance ministers are still in paralysis, Bernanke should act alone.

        

The coordinated global rate cuts finally happened, 24 hours too late after global markets crashed once more, most notably the Japanese Nikkei down over 9% yesterday. The Fed's 50bp cut was tepid and traders know it; the Fed had already been pumping money into the system to imply that rate.

Why the subdued, late reactions? Global coordination requires bureacratic buy-in. Bernanke can't go for the quick fix (say, 100bp + cut) without consensus. The European Central Banks have always been reluctant to move quickly and lower rates, and their compasses are off while being dragged into an extraordinary crisis they once thought was America's problem:


The markets will continue its drop until this bureaucracy gets it right to restore global investor confidence. Dow now down 200 @ 9:20am PDT

Wouldn't surprise me if more rate cuts follow in quick succession as long as markets keep tanking. The damage to investor confidence has been done. Although I would expect the rebound to be sudden and swift when buyers do eventually return, it will be extremely volatile as freaked out stock-ascetic investors continue to sell into rallies.

Three short weeks ago, Paulson and Bernanke were right to sound the alarm to move quickly with the then surprise bailout plan. They saw how close the markets were to short circuiting, and now it's a foregone conclusion.

        

(Image attribution - Dennis Cox)

The Reserve Bank of Australia just cut their interest rate 100 bp (Tuesday morning) and pared losses in all Asian markets as traders see the first signs of coordinated global Central Bank action to stop the bloodletting. Expect a series of rate cuts as the sun rises on each market.

Update 10/7/08 7:20am PDT: it appears the Central Banks are still testing the waters with the reaction to the Australian cut. Instead of a rate cut today, the Fed is setting up a Commercial Paper Funding Facility that Bernanke will discuss at 10:00am PDT. This will be another of many moves to unfreeze the credit markets.

        

From the Chicago Tribune:

        

Market pundits have been saying all along that complete, utter capitulation would signal a market bottom... well, it's here and it's scary... who has the nerve to step up?

Chronicling all of today's capitulation news:

• Jim Cramer - Time to get out of the stock market
• CNN Money Poll: 60% say Depression is Likely
  
• FT Alphaville Market Live - Capitulation Edition at 19H
• Sinking Rapidly into Depression - Today October 6, 2008 is the Day of Reckoning
  

        

Frances Flynn Thorsen, our new Trulia Voices Community Manager
Way to go Frances!

Last June, 2007, I wrote about how participants of Web 2.0 congregating at a virtual "water cooler"  would eventually translate their online presence into greater roles within the industry. Since then, several Real Estate 2.0 companies have gone on recruitment sprees:

Inman News:


Active Rain


Trulia


Reprise of Article  The Web 2.0 Water Cooler, June 21, 2007

Xerox Parc, Microsoft, Apple, Google - are not only tech pioneers but renowned incubators of talented business builders... Zillow's founders can trace their genetics back to Microsoft via Expedia. On a macro level, the "best and brightest" (an idiom I try to avoid using) have tended to congregate together in close proximity - creative film makers in LA, deal makers on Wall Street, VCs on Sand Hill Road.

On a micro level, congregation once happened exclusively on a physical level - inside office buildings, on golf courses and at tradeshows. Today's social networking tools add a third dimension... face to face remains important but the initiation of introduction can be made online in various ways. MySpace, Linkedin, Facebook, Active Rain, blogs - all disclose enough information about an individual and their networks to warrant a "warm, receptive" cold call or referral. I myself always feel honored to get a cold call... it should be a commonplace occurrence.

The new "virtual" networks aggregate talent similar to how the Microsoft water cooler spawned the many ideas that led to startups. The collective real estate blogosphere has become an open forum for the new ideas that chart the strategic course of the industry... its participants include CEOs, line management and entrepreneurs who were relatively inaccessible pre-social media.

The big surprise to new bloggers and Web 2.0 participants is entrance into this virtual society that they didn't realize existed (including me). The friendships and network built are as real as the office water cooler, and it's not a giant leap to understand that your next client/business partner/job will be facilitated in some way by this virtual society, particularly if your "physical" network of office and work/school - related buddies also joins up.

Related articles:

So you Need a Job? Man, do Resumes Suck by Scoble, October 5, 2008
Resumes are for shit. The four things you really need: Linkedin, Blog, Keywords, Social Media

        

Now that recessionary fears have spread globally, all the traders are clamoring for a coordinated rate cut by all the Central Banks. The bailout/rescue bill passed Friday is now being seen more as a bandaid than a solution, and interbank lending still remains non-existent.

Remember that cash and investors still exist, there's still a lot of sovereign cash out there in the Persian Gulf and China waiting to be deployed. The players in this crashing market are the sellers who are forced to sell.

Next? Trust needs to be restored for investors by a demonstration of a "throw everything at the problem including the kitchen sink" strategy on a global level. Expect a coordinated global rate cut to lower all interest rates, maintaining the dollar's strength while factoring in that the recession will limit inflationary risk.

        

This article is simply about attracting new traffic to a blog.

Woman buys abandoned Saginaw MI Home on eBay for $1.75


Google Blogsearch has relaunched to highlight popular stories covered by blogs across 11 categories:

• Politics
• US
• World
• Business
• Technology
• Video Games
• Science
• Entertainment
• Movies
• Television
• Sports

In the Business section, the abovementioned $1.75 house was the top real estate story followed by 9 blogs:



So, now if you need a story idea that will attract traffic, head over to Google Blogsearch and find one. It's now similar to Digg or Techmeme, two types of news aggregators.