A board on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange floor shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 800 points, during the trading day Monday.

Ali Velshi | Bio
CNN Senior Business Correspondent

Editor’s Note: Today, CNN Anchor Rick Sanchez asked CNN Senior Business Correspondent Ali Velshi, “Why did we pass this bailout and the market doesn’t show any signs of life?” His answer is below:

I want to remind people, the bailout - I said we needed a bailout because the credit markets are frozen. The credit markets affect you by getting loans to people who need to buy your house and loans to your company to make operating expenses like payroll… Now, you would expect after the bailout bill was passed, we’d see a more positive reaction. Buried in all of that stuff on Friday was a report that we’d lost 159,000 jobs bringing this year’s total to 3/4 of a million. That’s the single most important thing…

(But) scared to death doesn’t help. The panic doesn’t help. Don’t bother being about that. Markets are tripping over themselves to get in and they always get in too late. Don’t panic about this… We watched the market very closely in the last hour, particularly the last 15 minutes to see how things are going. The fact that the market is going up and down, on the down side, but it’s moving, it’s not consistent, tells me this isn’t people bailing out of the market. There is a buyer for everybody trying to sell a stock today. A very serious market is when you’re trying to sell stocks and there are no buyers at any point. At this point, the market would have to be down 2,200 points to stop trading for the rest of the day. This is not as disorderly as it looks.

For those of you with 401(k)s, your loss will be very reflective of the loss on the S&P 500 and the Dow, 25 to 30%. You didn’t make any bad decisions. Hold on and don’t panic.