The market seems to be selling-off on the back of limited bad news imo, apart from the dollar that is.

If you can hold your nerve and apart from any short term requirements to offload poor performing stocks, I have a couple!!, my advice would be sit tight. This does not have the feel of the tech(mining!) bubble at all. Difference being there are a lot of good fundamentals, unlike in 2000 when there were a lot of over rated nothing companies.

As children we emulate the actions of others and try to learn from our mistakes to avoid future pain. Many will have been burned in the past with the collapse of BCCI, LTC and the end of the dotcom boom, not to mention more recent stockmarket wobbles. But could our fear bring about the very cotastrophes we worry about? Just as there was no petrol shortage before long queues formed at the start of the fuel crisis, could we see a similar outcome from queues outside Northern Rock? At a time when liquidity is poor the last thing banks need is people demanding their money back. Only time will tell I guess, but when logic is divorced from reality the strangest things can happen.....

In my opinion.

Strawbs.

D'accord.
Anyone with <30k in there has nothing at all to fear.
The banks problems were caused by not having enough deposited.A media fired scrum outside the branches all asking for their money back can only make it worse.
Still sensible people acting logically and a bank slowly recovering from a world wide problem has never made particularly good headlines, in my very cynical opinion.
Reading some of the media crap in the populist press, one would assume the entire banking system was about to collapse and we would be bartering half a pig for a bushel of corn by christmas. Better headlines but bullshit of the highest order.
The FSA would be well advised to read the editorials and journalistic comments in some of the last couple of days papers and ask what exactly qualifies these people to cause such mayhem.
They would be pretty quick if a bunch of senior financial advisors suddenly started writing popular press painting doom laden pictures of a particular investment, without very good reason.

That's my fear. People's own actions will create a crisis where no crisis (or at least a managable one existed). These actions may bring about a collapse, and then if another bank comes to the BOE in need of short term funding the arguments will be; That's what they said last time and look what happened.... If this scenario actually plays out it could be very very messy indeed.

In my opinion.

Strawbs.

i see your just as optomistic as ever - do you own a gas oven?

The point is that the money NRK have asked for (but not used) is actually nothing to do with covering deposits or anything even remotely like that.
Daft as it seems, NRK are asking for government money, to satisfy the governements liquidity rules, via the FSA.
If that aint circular financing, then nothing is!!
There is no great crisis, other than that of confidence. There will not be a crisis of any financial type unless every deposit in NRK is withdrawn. Even then it would be a fairly small one, covering a few recent retail loans.
NRK has no exposure worth talking about to much other than retail lending and deposits. It is not a Barings or BCCI. It is not Barclays or HBOS. It is a relative minnow that put most of its eggs in one basket.
But read the press and it is the end of capitalism and the begining of financial meltdown. It will be if people are allowed to carry on believing what these tuppence ha'penny journalists write.
It is a self fulfilling prophecy and too many people are gullible enough to believe the nonsense written. If the storm continues and other banks find themselves in a similar position, we can only blame ourselves for allowing The Sun and Daily Mirror to talk us into it, for the sake of a bit of extra circulation.

So far NRK has handled the "run" on the bank far too casually they should have brought in extra staff to get the queues off the streets as quickly as possible in order to restore confidence. I have experienced bank "runs" in Hongkong years ago and the only way to restore confidence is give depositors their funds without delay. It is a waste of resources having staff handing out reassuring leaflets to customers standing in a queue for hours trying to get their life savings back.It is strange that inspite of the tens of millions spent on computer systems this bank has branches that can only process 10 withdrawals per hour as reported on SKY.

No maddoc. Just an electric one. I was just trying to point out that it's often the actions of the crowd that make these problems worse...

Strawbs

strawbs , agree with you entirely , if the Sun & Daily Mirror carrying masses had not rushed for the door there would have been only a minor problem - now i have got a severe headache as i am caught up in a big way in this mess. Spent Sunday going through the small print of nrk deposit conditions and other banks in the firing line instead of doing something i enjoy :-(((

Sadly we're all in the same boat in a strange way. For all I know my bank could be the next one, and despite my worries over the stupidity of crowds, I dare say I'd be queueing to withdraw my cash too. Hopefully it won't come to that though. As I've often observed, we're all guilty of being either too pessimistic or too optimistic at times, and where money is concerned seldom realistic enough.....

Hope your headache isn't too bad.....

Strawbs.

confess i hold AL (bought cos i thought it was a solid defensive banking stock!) and BARC, but with the latest indiscriminate rout of all financial stocks, i just wonder if it makes the likes of BARC, in particular, and perhaps (still) AL a tempting target for one of the overseas banks

Time to initiate stop-loss on AL and BARC.

i'll prob just sit out the storm with both ...... 95% certain that BARC has little or no problem and, in failing to capture ABN, may now be a target hemselves ...... AL, not quite so sure as there seem to be conflicting stories and evidence zipping about

Sitting on the sidelines with cash still feels the best thing to do at the mo (until volatility blows over) and liability becomes clearer, good luck to people still trading (with stop loses in place of course).

i would not be at all susprised to see Wall Street finishing down pretty sharply, for even if rates are cut by 0.5%, it has already been written into the prices, and anticipation is always ahead of the news ....... anyone disagree?

what he says will be just as important - like here with nrk , its a confidence thing rather than 0.25 or 0.5 cut

See what happens in the USA later today ,a 1/4 point cut is expected ,any more would be a bonus.

EDIT ,i think a half point cut may help cynic

we shall see ..... wonder if i shall be brave/rash enough to open a short ...... shall be cross if i am am proved right, but not half as cross if i do it and am wrong!

The DOW'S a tricky one today ,it's a flip of the coin job.

ok then .... we the quite well forecast 0.5% cut in US rates and the market has, as lest initially, rocketed 250 points ...... too far too fast yet again? ..... we shall have to wait and see

given that Dow was +80 or thereabouts before the announcement, i suppose any finish of +120 or more can't be bad news for tomorrow's opening in London