Wall Street decision -makers are preparing for more chaos after the markets plunge

There was little rest at Wall Street this weekend. There was a lot of anger, anxiety, frustration and fear.

The anger against President Trump for an impetuous and chaotic deployment of prices which erased billions of dollars of stock market value in two days. Anxiety about the state of the investment capital industry and other colossal funds with global investments. The frustration among the elite of Wall Street to their sudden inability to influence the president and his advisers.

And the fear of what could come afterwards.

The hedge funds counted their losses and boasted if they only lost. Bankers and lawyers have already torn the calendars already sparse to conclude transactions, reasonable that no director general would soon risk a large merger or a public offer. The big banks have played emergency scenarios to guess whether a client or another would fail in the cascade effects of an international trade war.

In conversations with the New York Times during the weekend, bankers, leaders and traders said they felt flashbacks to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, the one who shot a number of Wall Street giants. Leaving aside the brutal panic, but relatively short -lived, which broke out at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the speed of last week’s market drop – the shares dropped by 10% in just two days – was only exceeded by the waves of sale which came while Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

Like then, the extent of the current suddenly descending – with oil, copper, gold, cryptocurrencies and even the dollar taken in the sale – has the greatest players of Wall Street wondering which of their competitors and counterparts was taken to the end. Banks have asked negotiated customers to publish additional funds if they want to continue to borrow money to negotiate – margin calls that have not almost reached the level of a generation earlier, but which nevertheless cause discomfort.

Most hedge funds and other private investors do not share the details of their portfolios daily or every week, it will therefore take more than a weekend so that potential damage is known. An venture capital, speaking on condition of anonymity because he had not officially informed his investors, said his portfolio had lost $ 1.5 billion. It was if his barely negotiated investments could be sold.