As if to illustrate our post this morning, and to illustrate just how jittery the market is, and to painfully illustrate just how dangerous the situation in Japan is still, the news late this morning out of Europe, regarding the nuclear crisis in Japan, drove every asset into an immediate nosedive (or in the case of the safe havens, a sharp spike higher.)
The latest news roiling the markets is about Japan, but it isn’t actually coming from Japan. Rather, the EU’s commissioner for energy, Guenther Oettinger, told a European Parliament committee “the site is effectively out of control.” This reiterated the same comments reported in two UK papers, the Telegraph and Daily Mail.
Look at the pictures in the Mail’s story; I have a more comprehensive grasp of just how bad the damage is after seeing them. They are sobering. There have been reports that those 50 people who’ve been — heroically — trying to save the plant had to be evacuated temporarily, and you wonder how long they can stay there.
The Dow dropped as much as 190 points in a matter of minutes. It bounced back to about down just 100, and is currently down around 170. All this underscores the fact that the market is a rough place to be right now, especially if you’ve been hooked by the Street’s usual sunny pronouncements.
