What market watchers are saying this week

David Parkinson

Too big to bail

"If I could have done anything to save it, I would have saved it."

- Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke tells a congressional commission that he didn’t want Lehman Brothers to collapse, but there was nothing he could legally do to rescue the company.

And Lehman was the SUV hitting the fire hydrant?

"Tiger, the economy and capital markets are in a post-excess-collapse mode. Tiger until very recently could not predictably hit a fairway any more than the markets can predictably rise moderately and stick above their 50-day average. In this phase, every minute swing of the club and of the markets is obsessively analyzed for an indication of a stable turnaround."

- Mark Kryzan of Shaunessy Investment Counsel Inc. says the financial markets look a lot like Tiger Woods: The “testosterone-fuelled” excesses, the drastic fall from grace and the ongoing struggle to find their game again.

The Iger sanction

"If Steve Jobs jumped off a cliff, Iger would hold his ankles on the way down."

- An unnamed television industry executive takes a shot at Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger’s decision to sign on with Apple Inc., whose CEO, Steven Jobs, is Disney’s largest shareholder, to offer online “rentals” of its TV shows at 99 cents an episode.

Begging for change on Main Street

"What they like to describe as a battle between Wall Street and Main Street is no such thing. In the end, Wall Street will make out fine."

- Linda Thompson, Mayor of Harrisburg, after Pennsylvania’s capital city revealed it doesn’t have any money to make a $3.3-million (U.S.) bond repayment due this month and is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

From soup lines to Money Mart

"True, we can’t see the soup lines; but the soup lines are in the mail."

- Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg suggests the 99-week-extended-benefit cheques being mailed to the masses of unemployed Americans are disguising the severity of the economic slump, which, he argues, bears many hallmarks of a 1930s-style Depression.