At 4:15 Eastern, the futures close down for 15 minutes and then the evening session begins. Since the futures reopened, they have added another 3% with their current price of 1046.25.

Kind of difficult to see because the drop is so vertical but the BDI shows being more than 5000 points below its 200 DMA.Actually I just saw a quote on CNBC Asia that at showed BDI down another 10% from where it is on the chart.I'm not sure what to conclude but it clearly reveals how crazy the last couple of months have been.

As I peer out my window towards the Alpes and the northern entry point to Le Vallé du Rhône I am wondering whether the experiments conducted only 40 kilometers from my current habitat haven't gone terribly wrong? Consequently, it is getting decidedly difficult not to link the initiation of experiments to uncover the illusive Hick's Particle with the all encompassing black hole that seems to be disturbing the workings of financial markets.

One place where the crisis is fast making its presence increasingly felt is Eastern Europe as well as the Baltics; the latter being the immediate focus of this piece. This is not so strange. On many occasions since the credit crisis went global back in the summer of 2007 many analysts including yours truly have been flagging the risks for a hard landing in Eastern Europe. This situation has by and large materialised at this

...

We've been waiting for this news, and we wrote about these two badly beaten ETF's that rip when the Banks do the same back on Sept 19th. We were early to the party with these ETF's, but now is the time. Today we got word that the U.S. Treasury official overseeing the $700 billion rescue of the financial system, said government equity injections will be aimed at 'healthy'' firms. So you play that two ways: You may remember our Highlander tribute (The SKF is dead, now its the XLF ...

Daniel Bates discusses the beach restoration and other topics related to preserving the environment.