Quote from hughb:
I wonder if a better comparison for this market would be 1907. JP Morgan orchestrated a bailout then, similar to Paulson today, except Mr. Morgan didn't pick the pockets of taxpayers to do it.
If I have my facts straight, and I'm not too confident because I've read conflicting stories, Mr. Morgan returned to New York on Saturday, October 19 from a church convention in Richmond, VA. The next day bank presidents were coming to Mr. Morgan's home to find a solution. Mr. Morgan played bop-a-mole until early November taking on crisis after crisis until he even went to meet with President Roosevelt to convince him to give companies a pass on the Sherman Anti-Trust act so they could take over weak competitors. Taking a look at a long term Dow chart, the market bottomed in December of that year when a new bull market was ushered in.
So, if you compare the two, you can see that Paulson/Benanke have been fighting crisis after crisis and are now orchestrating a huge bailout that required congressional approval. If my comparison is accurate, then we are near a stock market bottom even though an economic recession could last a little while.