What's next for Wall Street?

Although I am sure there will be a continuous stream of negative news stories over the coming months, the question is what new, big, and significant events might transpire, or whether we in fact have made it though 75%, 80%, 90%, or even 95% of the really big bad news for the current "crisis."

We do know that there are waves of mortgage rate resets and foreclosures coming up in the coming months, but we do not know how many of them will get worked out and how many might blow up into new major events for Wall Street. My suspicion is that investors have already discounted mortgages far beyond the rate at which they will actually become problematic. Financial institutions may not have written off all of those revaluations, but I suspect that such write-downs will be "more of the same" rather than major new events that further weaken confidence in the financial system.

What else? What might be next?

Sure, you can hypothesize all manner of potential calamities, but the pace seems to have slowed.

Certainly the economic outlook is a big concern, but so many people have already assumed that we are already in a recession that the actuality is more likely to be less severe than the current anxiety.

What else?

Despite the so-called "credit crisis", a lot of people do seem to still be able to borrow a fair amount of money. 0% $0 down car loans and no-doc no-down mortgages may be gone, but that is here already, not something looming in the future.

We may actually seem to have finally reached the stage where financial reality has finally started to sink in.

I am sure that most of the bears will steadfastly claim that we are nowhere near a "bottom", but that is what they always say.

-- Jack Krupansky