Dude, Where's My Ambien?

Two weeks ago Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who's been heading up the congressional panel overseeing bailout money spending was interviewed on PBS. In her answer to the first question, Warren pointed out that while the catastrophe was stopped, the underlying Wall Street regulations aren't changing. In her words,

"nobody goes to bed now and worried that, when we wake up tomorrow morning—that—that markets will have disappeared"

This was aired on Friday, Nov. 13. Two weeks later we had the Dubai scare. The timing, the geo-location (western banks financing the middle east) and market segment (commercial real estate) of the Dubai event match the coordinates in recent warnings by Roubini and Prechter. Also, as one commentator has mentioned, large construction projects are where economies go to die. Commentators were enlisted to scribe duty out of their holiday vacations. Can you blame anyone for losing sleep?

No, markets have not disappeared. But two weeks after her worthy interview aired, I'll bet an Emirate Dinar Ms. Warren would have rephrased her "Not Losing Sleep Over Disappearing Markets" if she was to be interviewed today.

This is how much things have shifted in two weeks.