As we satirised in our round-up of the week on Friday, the eagerly awaited Congressional approval of the bailout - now officially named the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) - has not magically resolved the many problems faced by the financial sector.
The Tarp was approved before US markets closed on Friday and yet our HEXUS.sharewatch table, which compares the price of share this morning with close of business last Monday - immediately after Congress had initially rejected the Tarp - reveals there has been no bounce.
The Dow and NASDAQ both finished the week down on even the depths plumbed on Monday. The FTSE 100 finished last week a bit up, but opened this morning down over 200 points after a bunch of bad news from Europe over the weekend and the likelihood of Germany following Ireland's lead and guaranteeing all deposits in its banks.
There is now increasing pressure on other countries to follow suit in order to stop depositors in their banks fleeing to Irish or German ones. However, it looks like the UK has around double the amount deposited as the Germans and our public finances are already in a mess so that's not necessarily a good thing.
A lot of tech companies have taken even more of a kicking over the past week than the general market. Among the notable fallers were Apple (again), Avnet, IBM, Ingram Micro, Tech data and Yahoo!
It's interesting that all the distributors are significantly down. Given that providing credit to the channel is a big part of what distributors do, it's perhaps surprising that they haven't been falling for longer. It will be worth keeping an eye on them as barometers of the state of credit within the channel.
