It's about time…

Unfortunately, it will take more.

The markets seem to be responding positively to the enormous new commitments by the United States and Europe to shore up banks.

However, it will take a lot of time for them to recover. The record-setting run-up on Monday could just as easily be reversed tomorrow.

Remember, the recovery from Black Tuesday took a quarter century. Hopefully it won't take that long. It took fifteen months for the markets to recover from the 1987 crash. That reflects the changes to the financial markets over sixty years and we can hope that the continuing evolution will help.

In the interim…

The interventions by the governments have to be monitored and if necessary, tweaked, to keep things moving forward. Otherwise, it could be one step forward, two steps back.