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Volume XI
Issue 8
August 2008

Federal Emergency Forces Mass
for Stock Market Rescue Effort
By Diane Donaldson
National Correspondent

(New York, N.Y., Dec. 31, 2003) -- Fearing that disaster may strike at any moment, federal officials continued to mass rescue forces at the doors of the New York Stock Exchange as the new year approached.

"This has been building for years," said Al Yellowstreak, U.S. Stock Supporter General, in a barely audible whisper. "I must ask you to speak very quietly because the slightest thing could touch off 'the big one.' Billions, literally billions, could be lost."

The precarious balance of the stock market, as it climbed impossibly skyward in the last decade, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Large sections, particularly in, the "high-tech" area, have frequently crumbled and and given way. This has often occurred without apparent cause, raining down losses and other debris, and inflicting heavy casualties.

"Take the California utility crisis of early 2001," Yellowstreak observed. "Investors started getting skittish over rumors that major banks could be running into major utility loan losses. When one major bank tried to defuse the situation by announcing it had no real problem, we had a big stock slide anyway. A few of the more courageous brokers jumped right in and did their best to dig investors out, but we lost some fine people that day, some damn fine people."

The market rebounded briefly in February of '01, when Yellowstreak's office intimated to selected members of the press that the new Bush administration would place all important decisions in the hands of experts. That tactic tanked two months later, when President Bush, acting on his own initiative as commander-in-chief, ordered U.S. naval forces to the Red Sea in the belief that the name signified a new hotbed of communism.

Yellowstreak's office has taken extreme measures to minimize further slides, working closely with the Federal Reserve Board. They quickly discovered, however, that reducing interest rates would no longer firm up the loose and trembling market formations.

"We gave up that practice in March of '02, when the interest rate was finally dropped to 0.9 percent in response to near-zero new car sales," Yellowstreak said. "With the price of money so cheap, people completely lost confidence in not only stocks, but in U.S. currency. They began hoarding buttons in anticipation of a coming barter economy. We then went to a happy rumor-based methodology."

For a while, Yellowsteak and his cohorts were able to shore up the market this way. When OPEC boosted oil prices by another $5 per barrel this August, Yellowstreak countered with a rumor that another Brady Bunch reunion movie was being produced. That slowed the decline for two days.

"As you can clearly see," Yellowstreak said, "we've reached a point at which very little done by my office has much of a stabilizing effect on the market. So, we're gathered out here with all the emergency rescue equipment we can muster, watching, waiting and attempting to be very, very quiet."

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