Is this what you are referring to and would this be the type of current activity that is hammering the likes of rosseau &co.:
"10 October 2008
In short, no.
This is what is called a short term liquidity crunch, where traders, in this case most likely hedge funds and small speculators, go into panic selling to address margin calls and short term cash obligations. It is the unwinding of leveraged positions under extreme short term duress. There is some talk that the CDS situation is causing this, and rumours that the banks are forcing the selling by raising short term margin and issuing margin calls, perhaps to an excess.
It is possible to turn this into a deflation, given time and a tightening of the money supply relative to economic growth. The word 'moment' is the tipoff here. There are no 'moments' in a real inflation or a real deflation. They are trends of weeks and months and sometimes years. Short term events, whether due to a storm, the collapse of a company, a panic, are just that: events.
What we are seeing today, almost across the board, is hedge funds selling almost everything to raise cash to meet their obligations. We suspect that the Lehman CDS settlement today may be a precipitant. We are also seeing banks continuing to tighten their lending even to the funds.
It will reach a climax and then things will begin to normalize. VIX is at crash levels today.
For this to become a true 'deflation' would require the world's central banks to start tightening credit, raising interest rates, tightening government budgets. Lets see if they do that. Merely doing nothing would probably not even be enough, since the market would just find a level at which it could clear and then normalize. It takes serious government meddling to create problems like a hyperinflation or a true deflation.
Its important to keep these things square in our minds. Cooler heads prevail, given a little time, and panicking is never a wise strategy, unless you panic first. We're probably beyond that point.."
