David Rosenberg Says Bye-Bye To The "Put"

Yesterday, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher talked about the "Bernanke put" and the potential end to it. During the late 1990's and the early 2000's, we had the "Greenspan put." David Rosenberg, the notoriously bearish economist from Gluskin Sheff & Associates is saying good bye to those "puts" and hello to more misery for investors in the stock market. In an article on Marketwatch, Rosenberg made some incredibly bearish comments, and based on today's 400 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial, he may be right. “It should not be lost on anybody that every other time in the past when the equity market sagged as much as it has in the past few months — down almost 20% peak-to-trough — the Fed could always be relied upon to cut interest rates and hold everybody's hand in the process,” said Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff & Assoc. “The Fed now has no such cannon, nor does it even have a pistol — we are down to unconventional firecrackers. And even with these, the Fed has been doing little more than alter the wording in its press statement.” The Greenspan & Bernanke put: R.I.P.” The "put" he is referring to is that whenever the stock market fell sharply for an extended period of time, the chairmen of the Federal Reserve would essentially bail out investors, and do something to make stocks go up. We saw that with quantitative easing from Bernanke, and the massive rate cuts from Greenspan. Now with QE1 & QE2 having been done, and rates near 0, Rosenberg is saying there is pretty much nothing left for the Fed to do. What do you think? Is the "Bernanke put" dead? Tell us in the comments.