ECB köper spanska och italienska statspapper och räntorna vänder ner… frågan är om det räcker?

Credit Suisse poängterar att deras bägge sentiments index visar på extrema nivåer;

Last week our global risk appetite index plunged deep into panic, while US duration risk appetite soared into euphoria. These two measures have never moved so quickly and so simultaneously into panic and euphoria before, though October 2002 comes close.

This tells us three things:
1/// last week’s equity market plunge is not some subliminal signal that the US economy is already in recession. Nor is it a sign that Italy is about to default, or that this is already Lehman II.
It is above all a signal that policy credibility has collapsed. In short, the real crash in confidence is about the capacity of policy to support recovery in the US, or to resolve Europe’s sovereign funding issues in a timely way. Since it is a policy credibility issue above all, this week-end’s emergency response is welcome but needs to be very determined.

komm, nåt måste komma från politikerna. det finns ju även en skola som säger att politikerna aldrig kan komma med rätsida ur det här utan att marknaden måste självsanera. Det enda politiska measures gör är att skjuta på problemen och göra dem värre den dagen man måste ta tag i det.

2/// this kind of shift in the collective mood is highly and rapidly contagious precisely because of the market price signals it generates: as risky asset prices fall and safe asset prices rise, emotion sweeps through the system and sweeps aside more sober judgment. This is no exception – on the contrary, it is a particularly violent example of emotional overshooting. And it leaves us as sure as we can be about anything that consensus expectations about growth and policy capacity have become far more pessimistic than the facts really warrant.

3/// in a strange twist of fate, the most immediate problem is not likely to be Europe itself. In the US, it may be even more difficult to take immediate concrete actions to reassure investors that policy can support recovery while addressing the more structural and long-term budget challenges. Especially in the wake of S&P’s decision to go ahead with its downgrade of longer-term US government debt.

The key issue will be avoiding a disruptive widening of credit spreads – including agency debt, municipal and lower rated corporate bonds – rather than the direct impact on Treasury yields themselves. We suspect that this will require further policy initiatives from the Fed and even the G-20.

Alla vet ju att de bästa köplägena känns helfel… och detta skulle stämma att köpa nu av bara den anledningen. Men om det bara är slutet på början (av en ny björnmarknad)…