Mind Over Market

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, on CNBC's Squawk Box, October 26, 2012. Excerpts: Steve Liesman: Let's talk about the recent marekt sell-off. It's been sharp and it's causing a lot of concern. What's the cause in your opinion? Is the market telling us something about the economy that we don't already know? Larry Fink: I think the market is now responding to the pending fiscal cliff. We're starting to approach the election. There's uncertainty about who will be President and how the fiscal cliff will be resolved. CEO's today are pensive about what to do next. They're just sitting back. They're not hiring as much. They're probably not spending as much. So, there's a deceleration in the economy and we all are starting to feel it. Additionally we were expecting a little more resolution in Europe. We're waiting for Spain to act and accept conditionality and that' s probably been delayed by a couple of...

"You can't understand the United States at all unless you understand what's going in Europe," Greenspan stated in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box October 7, 2011. "I think we have been through a remarkably elaborate program to try to find out whether the single currencies work," he said. Like others, Greenspan thought it would work in the beginning because the markets bought into the idea it would work. This could be seen in the pricing of the currencies in countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as they moved toward currency union. As the date of currency union approached in each country, the spread in interest rates of local currencies above the German bund would narrow dramatically from a level of a hundreds of basis points. "I said and thought the markets are assuming that the Greeks and the Italians and the Spaniards and Portuguese are going to behave like Germans, and that's what [the markets] were telling us," ...