"Do I expect a massive sell-off?" Mr. Spiro added.
Investors may be wrong to think that the Treasury Department will end up stepping in, but the hope that it would clearly averted a massive sell-off today.
"The massive sell-off on Wall Street triggered another selling in Tokyo," said Kazuki Miyazawa, market analyst at Daiwa Securities SMBC.
(The massive sell-off in the equity markets, for instance, didn't happen when Lehman went under. It happened when the House failed to pass the TARP the first time).
"Boris Berezovsky was among that wave of oligarchs who realized that great fortunes were to be made in the massive sell-off of assets in the new Russia," Mr. Hoffman said by e-mail on Saturday.
As it happens Pelé has just been back in England, promoting a massive sell-off of his hoard of medals and memorabilia, which will be auctioned over three days next week and is expected to raise as much as £5m.
After the massive sell-off in world markets and the similar dumping of U.S. stock-market futures (the futures market was actually limit-down by 5 A.M., which means that selling was halted), it looked like U.S. stocks were going to be absolutely crushed at the open this morning.
They're telling us both figuratively — just look at the massive sell-off we've seen in the past week and a half — and literally, since, day in and day out, traders and money managers are talking about how the fear of a G.M./Ford bankruptcy is dragging the market down.
Certainly, the stock market — even before what looks likely to be another massive sell-off today — is anticipating a serious economic downturn, which is why so many companies' stocks are trading at massive discounts to where they were just a few months ago.
