Ironic, isn’t it? Credit markets are frozen (LIBOR is marked at 5.22%, as credit spreads widen even further). I posed a question in an earlier post trying to figure out where the rest of the world stands, and why they haven’t come to our aid…this should help explain:

The U.K. Treasury seized Bradford & Bingley Plc, Britain’s biggest lender to landlords, while governments in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg extended an 11.2 billion-euro ($16.2 billion) lifeline to Fortis, Belgium’s largest financial- services firm. Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, Germany’s second- biggest commercial-property lender, received a 35 billion-euro loan guarantee from the state, and Iceland agreed to buy 75 percent of Glitnir Bank hf, the nation’s third-largest lender.

Europe clearly has problems of their own, and won’t be able to come in like a “JP Morgan of the public sector” and save us all.

Meanwhile, the ban of short selling has A) done nothing to slow down the precipitous selling and B) perhaps exacerbated our down swing, because there are no outstanding shorts in financials to be covered.

Dow components on the banned short-sale list

GM     -11.89%

JPM    -8.93%

C       -6.40%

BAC   -12.72%

Maybe the SEC singled out the wrong guys; we haven’t heard much about CDS regulation latley, but various ETF’s which use Credit-Default Swaps to short financials (SKF, SEF) were both fully effective in delivering results today.