How Does One Get Confidence?

A Market Meltdown That Won't Stop: Is This Rational? - TIME

Gee, Time magazine may even be starting to realize that removal of confidence from the public can have a downside rather than just the upside that they believe it will have of electing BO.

But as necessary as those moves may be, the stock market — the most visible gauge of investor sentiment — has not been convincingly reassured. Why doesn't the news of government's quick and sweeping response stop the slide? "The news has got nothing to do with it," says Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James. "What it is, is a sequence of events that have brought us into crash mode." Saut traces that sequence of events from the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which wiped out the stockholders of those institutions, to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which did the same to that company's investors, to the run on money-market mutual funds, to the run on Washington Mutual, to the House's unexpected failure to pass the bailout bill the first time around.

"This is a confidence game," says Saut, "and the public has lost confidence not only in financial institutions but also in their elected officials." And confidence, unfortunately, is much easier to lose than to gain.

Nice that Time is starting to figure this out NOW! Would have been a bit better if they had figured it out while they were braying about "recession" in the middle of mutiple quarters of GROWTH!! Once people start to believe in the UNreal, how in the world are they going to get them back to believing in the real?