aftershock, which is now out in paperback. ali, what happened today? a lot of things happened here. we had a situation where it s not just fear we ve been talking about. this was actual fact. we had we started this morning with with slow bad markets out of europe, then before the markets opened, we got this report from morgan stanley which talked about slow growth around the world telling us things we already knew. but they said we re on the precipice. they didn t say we were there, they didn t say it s the base case, but they said we re dangerously close. also cited errors in policymaking here in the united states and in europe. and they said it s likely that the european central bank and the fed would have to get further involved in this economy. now, you know all week we ve been talking about rick perry saying it would beo treasonous for the fed to get involved. it represents a view in america that the fed should do no more work in stimulating this economy. so now
four hours or so. morgan stanley come out with a global note cutting its global growth forecast and saying the u.s., the world is dangerously close to recession quite frankly and naming a couple of different reasons why they think that global growth will not be as strong as they thought. among them, europe s debt problems and also mentioning what they call policy mistakes in the u.s. and also the drama about the debt ceiling. they say, overall, consumer confidence, business confidence, almost this negative feedback loop we are on the verge of people being so worried and not able to break out of that. lowering their global growth forecasts and enough to shake a shaky market which bank stocks in europe are down and real concerns about the debt crisis in europe. still even after france s aaa rating was reaffirmed. an icky situation here this morning. the dax and ftse is down and cac is down also. bracing for a big sell-off this morning. saw new data from the united states. joble
anderson. he was giggle. that s the first time i have ever seen him completely lose it. it was funny. a lot to talk about this morning. we have breaking news. a suicide truck bomber targeting the u.s. military base in afghanistan. it happened in the city of gardez a few hours ago. officials say the truck ripped through the main security gate. killed two afghan guards. nine others were hurt. and the taliban is taking credit for the attack. less than two weeks after downgrading america s aaa credit rating standard and poor s is the target of a justice department investigation. that s according to the new york times. the feds want to know how the credit rating agency somehow missed the mortgage crisis. you will remember s&p along with the other major credit agencies gave those mortgage backed securities very high ratings. even though would now know they weren t worth the paper they were printed on. the times is reporting the justice department is looking into claims
we ll begin with the breaking news, all of us with money in the stock market, we re just catching our breath and now this, another big selloff on wall street. all three major indices way down at the closing bell. the dow losing a hefty 419 points. it s the fourth biggest slide for the dow in a month of big losses. the dow has plunged 1152 points so far this august. that s a drop 9.5%. and the month isn t even over yet. let s turn to cnn s richard quest. he s following what s going on. a lot of traders on wall street, richard, they re blaming what s happening where you are in europe for a lot of the problems here in the united states. do they have a point? way too simplistic to put it like that, wolf. there are problems on both sides of the atlantic. what prefaced today s fall was the morgan stanley s report that warned of a dangerous risk of recession in the united states and in the euro zone because of what it called policy errors and sluggish growth. it s not you cannot
europeans and the americans might have to have more central bank intervention into the markets and also said that there have been policy decisions in europe and the united states that have been poor, and then on top of that, that was enough. that was already bad, brooke. then we got some economic reports right here in the united states. slowdown in housing, slowdown in manufacturing, and, you know, not a great report about new jobless claims. basically it all piled on. people ran out of stocks and back into into, you know, safer investments, but, really, it all started in europe. let s go there, richard quest. tell us what you did. we had a pretty awful day on the european markets. the dax in germany, main index in germany was off by 6%. by the close, all the major european markets down 4%, 4.5% and 5%. and the real reason, very much following on your theme, having had fear, worry and concern. now there are facts, and they may not be very strong facts, but as we will show