All their manipulation is just doing a dandy job isn't it? You have to wonder what kind of mess we'd be in if they had just left the markets to work it all out on their own. I suppose gold would be way up... and so would material stocks.. and that would have meant that at least one sector was way up. Investors would have had a reason to be in the market... instead of fleeing on mass.

The dollar would be down and that would have been good for US manufacturing.

Emerging markets would probably have faired considerably better offering a market for those cheaper American produced goods and those wealthier people in those emerging markets might even have tossed a few dollars into the US stock exchange... giving a little life to some of the more beaten up stocks.

Financials would surely have taken it on the chin. Several would have gone under and several would have emerged stronger than ever. The sector would have purged it's weak. We would have seen the sector spike down very quickly and then pop back up as is the case when markets are not falsely supported on the way down, leaving us with a slow bleed that seems never to find it's bottom as we have now.

Transports would have fallen but perhaps not as much... international shipping may have gained as there would then be a reason to ship both ways, rather than a half empty ship coming to America and completely empty ship returning to Asia.

Instead our market magicians gave us this... no it's not the great depression... as Bernanke said just months ago that we would never see... it's the greater one. And just as WW2 was not WW1, this will surely take down many more markets and be much more global in it's scope.