Well, I'm sure all of you expected a fantastic Halloween blog-- it being Halloween and all. But, I think my coworkers have covered that ish. And let's face it, if you don't have your Halloween on at this point, it's not going to happen. Regardless, you might have noticed that the U.S. financial system is having its own little horror show. There are more investment ghouls out there than you could toss a corpse at. But when the U.S. celebrates Money Halloween, so does the rest of the world. It seems that not only have we infected the world with subtitled and dubbed apparitions of Anna Faris and Leslie Nielsen in the disaster that is Scary Movie 4 (or really, any of the Scary Movies), but we also passed on the horror of a collapsing financial system.
Here's a short sampling of how countries worldwide are reacting:
- Iceland. Its banking system completely collapsed and is now being rescued by loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
- Germany. The German government is bailing out its system to the tune of €500 billion.
- India. The government and the opposition party are in a conflict over how to remedy an economic situation that is bad and could become "truly horrendous."
- Japan. They had avoided the horror at first, but are now being swept into the maelstrom. The Tokyo market has dropped by almost 50 percent.
- China. They were asked to help bailout other countries.
For more horror, check out Forbes update on worldwide financial developments and The Economic Times list of bailouts around the world. But I don't want to leave you on a total Debbie Downer swoon, so hopefully this picture of the Editorial Team in our costumes cheers you up. --Jens
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