Wall Street wants us to think that “it feels more like a 9/11 - not 2008.”
They have two selfish reasons for this.
Firstly, it's all about "don't blame us." Because if we blame Wall Street then they won't get their taxpayer bailouts.
Secondly, the economy bounced back from 9/11, so you should buy those Wall Street products now while they are still cheap.

Both of these reasons are complete bullsh*t, and the proof can be seen in the actions of the Federal Reserve.

Everyone remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
But the beginning of the crash began in the summer of 2007 with Bear Stearns.
If you only focus on the Lehman event you might believe that the lesson to be learned was the government should have bailed out Lehman. It distracts from the fact that every major bank was already insolvent by the time of the Lehman event.

It's easy to blame the collapse of the markets entirely on the coronavirus, but it doesn't explain the fact that the Fed was bailing out Wall Street for months before the coronavirus even existed.

in terms of Wall Street privatizing profits and socializing losses, this is exactly like the last financial crisis.

Wall Street’s crisis has a specific launch date: September 17, 2019. That’s when the Fed, for the first time since the last financial crisis, began dumping hundreds of billions of dollars a week into Wall Street’s trading houses. That program, called “repo loans,” now tallies up to more than $9 trillion in cumulative loans made to Wall Street at super-cheap borrowing rates. The first article we wrote on that Fed program was dated September 18, 2019 and titled: The Fed Intervened in Overnight Lending for First Time Since the Crash. Why It Matters to You.

September 17 was almost four months before the first death from coronavirus was reported in China on January 11, 2020 and five months before the first death was reported on February 28, 2020 in the U.S.

Yes, the coronavirus was an event that was outside of the control, or blame, of Wall Street. That much is true.
But what was also true was that the markets were already in trouble and ready to crash four months before the first person got sick, based on the actions of the guys who do the bailouts.

"History never repeats itself, but it rhymes."
- Mark Twain

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."
- Karl Marx

On the surface the markets are somewhat more stable this week, but behind the scenes the Fed is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the markets. Consider just the Fed's money printing from just this week.

After buying $40 billion in Treasuries on Monday and again on Tuesday, the Federal Reserve upped the ante to $45 billion on Wednesday — to no avail. The Fed announced late Wednesday that it planned to buy $50 billion in Treasuries on Thursday and again on Friday.

By Thursday morning, it had upped the plan to $75 billion on each day and added $10 billion in mortgage securities. By Friday morning, the Fed had decided to buy $107 billion worth of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities.

This week's Fed quantitiative easing purchases will amount to $317 billion, which is slightly faster than the Fed balance sheet grew at the height of the financial crisis.

That's an enormous, unprecedented amount of money.
And despite throwing hundreds of billions in QE at the markets, the S&P 500 is down nearly 4% today as I write this.

QE money printing is the least of what the Fed is doing.

One half hour before midnight yesterday, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors quietly rolled out one more in a string of bailout measures it has been announcing since Sunday night to deal with Wall Street’s decade long gorging on speculative debt, derivatives, stock buybacks, obscene pay, and its serial crime spree. Each one of these Fed programs is identical, or almost identical, to the programs the Fed operated during the 2007-2010 financial crisis. If this were truly “nothing like” the last financial crisis, why would the Fed be using the identical measures to try to stem the crisis?

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced this past week that it “has reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26, the beginning of the next reserve maintenance period. This action eliminates reserve requirements for thousands of depository institutions and will help to support lending to households and businesses.”
In other words banks aren't required to hold ANY money in their vaults. Nothing at all.
Isn't that a bit alarming?

Then a few days ago the Fed decided to swap cash-for-trash.

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced at 6 P.M. last evening that it is following the direction of Steve Mnuchin, the former foreclosure king who now serves as U.S. Treasury Secretary, and authorizing the reinstatement of a hideously operated, multi-trillion dollar bailout program for Wall Street’s trading houses known as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF). Veterans on Wall Street think of it as the cash-for-trash facility, where Wall Street’s toxic waste from a decade of irresponsible trading and lending, will be purged from the balance sheets of the Wall Street firms and handed over to the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve – just as it was during the last financial crisis on Wall Street...
Just as is happening this time around, the Fed spun the story that the program would help American workers and businesses. It did no such thing. It went to bail out the trading and derivative operations of sinking ships on Wall Street as those same firms paid out millions of dollars in bonuses to their derelict executives and traders. Of the $8.95 trillion in loans issued by the PDCF, $5.7 trillion, or 64 percent, went to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch according to the GAO audit.

This needs to be put into perspective.
Normally to get cash from the Fed, a bank must provide quality collateral.

Collateral that is eligible for pledge under the Facility must be one of the following types:

1) U.S. Treasuries & Fully Guaranteed Agencies;
2) Securities issued by U.S. Government Sponsored Entities;

In normal times eligible collateral is limited to the first two items.
After all, you want your central bank to be financially solid, otherwise your currency turns to sh*t.
But these aren't normal times.

3) Asset-backed commercial paper that is issued by a U.S. issuer
4) Unsecured commercial paper that is issued by a U.S. issuer

This is not good. Commercial paper is solid assets in normal times, but not in a crisis of this magnitude.

5) U.S. municipal short-term debt that: i. Has a maturity that does not exceed 12 months

This is a step that Fed didn't do even in 2009.
Why are they doing this now? Because of this.

Next on the list will be corporate bonds.
Why? Because of this.

BBB is rated just one step above junk.
It turns out that during the past decade, our corporate masters (not satisfied with over-sized profits gained by not paying their workers) borrowed heavily in order to purchase their own stocks. All of this debt on company books forced down their credit ratings.

The average spread of bonds rated BBB widened to 3.68 percentage points as of last night (ICE BofA US BBB Effective Yield Index). BBB is the enormous and ballooning $3.3-trillion category of “investment-grade” bonds just above “junk” that everyone is fretting about. And this spread of 3.68 percentage points is the magic number that the index blew through on September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
Everyone is fretting about the BBB category of bonds because it’s so huge – it accounted for about half of all investment grade bonds – and because many of these bonds are going to be downgraded to junk during a downturn.

A lot of pension funds are forbidden from owning junk bonds. So any credit ratings cut in this huge pool of corporate bonds (which often happens in a financial crisis) will force pensions to sell their holdings.

Another thing like 2008 is the panic flight to cash. Total assets in government money-market funds rose by $249 billion to an all-time high of $3.09 trillion in the week ended March 18. The previous weekly inflow record? $176 billion set in September 2008 just after Lehman Brothers filed.