Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/financial-experts-examine-stock-market-irregularity Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Stock markets endured another week of highs and lows. The NewsHour talks to financial analysts about recent actions by the Federal Reserve and major financial institutions and what they may mean for the uneven market. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. RAY SUAREZ: It's been a turbulent time on Wall Street the past few weeks, as investors tried to gauge whether turmoil in the financial markets was a passing storm or might have more far-reaching effects. Fallout from the surge of defaults in subprime mortgages led to a general tightening of money in all lending markets and eventually to a so-called "liquidity freeze," where even borrowers with good credit histories find it difficult to secure loans. That triggered wild swings in the stock markets.But this week, that volatility cooled, following last Friday's announcement that the Federal Reserve Board had cut its interest rate on loans to banks, an effort to inject money into the financial markets. A further calming signal came Wednesday, when Bank of America invested $2 billion in Countrywide Financial Corporation, a company that funds roughly one in every six mortgages in the U.S. Those actions seemed to have had the desired effect, with the Dow holding steadily above 13,000 throughout the week.For more on the Fed's move and its effects on U.S. stocks and financial markets, I'm joined by James Angel, associate professor of finance at Georgetown University. He's a specialist in financial markets. And Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.And, Professor Angel, it's been a week since the Fed intervened in the mortgage meltdown in the stock markets. Did it work? JAMES ANGEL, Georgetown University: Yes. Even though it's been quite a jittery week, we see the volatility is starting to fall, and markets seem to be getting back to normal. RAY SUAREZ: And so this means the worst is over? What does it mean? JAMES ANGEL: Well, we don't know. We never know exactly what's going to happen in the future, but the Fed did exactly what they were supposed to do. They saw a credit crunch starting to happen, and it's their job to make sure that there's just enough money in the U.S. economy — not too much, not too little — and they saw the credit crunch happening, and so they said to the banks, "Hey, we want you to lend money. We're going to make it easy for you. We're cutting our interest rates."And the banks made a very public show of coming in and borrowing from the Fed. They're making it quite clear that they have the money available to lend.