SEC Chairman Chris Cox has apparently decided to ban short-selling for a while. This followed on the UK Financial Services Authority’s decision to ban short-selling in financial stocks until January 16. The Code of Financial Writing decrees that I’m supposed to condemn this as a politically motivated intrusion into the glorious workings of the market. [...]

This afternoon Charlie Gasparino reported on CNBC that Treasury was thinking about creating a fund to buy junky mortgage debt from banks and Wall Street firms, and the Dow shot up 400 points. I thought that seemed like an overreaction–of course Treasury was thinking about it. But this evening Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke are [...]

There are reports today that Morgan Stanley is talking to the China Investment Corp. (CIC) about buying 49% of the suddenly under-fire investment bank. (There are also reports that it’s talking to Citic, a Chinese securities firm, but those appear to be wrong.) But what doesn’t appear to have penetrated the consciousness of the U.S. [...]

Go shopping, of course. The quintessential value investor reacts exactly the way you’d expect, snapping up a good company that (he thinks) has been unfairly punished in the market. From CNBC.com: A subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway just announced a tentative agreement to buy Constellation Energy for roughly $4.7 billion in cash. MidAmerican Energy [...]

So yet another big dollar-pumping exercise by the world’s major central banks seems to have calmed down global markets that yesterday seemed on the verge of becoming completely unhinged. Which should give you time to read Andy Serwer’s and Allan Sloan’s fine TIME cover story on How Financial Madness Overtook Wall Street. A sample: How [...]