It took mere hours for yesterday's dramatic rally, sparked off by announcements of new stimulus measures, to dissolve into a pale shadow of what it once was as markets once more resumed the turmoil and anguish that has come to characterize the last few months, according to CNBC. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped by more than 900 points as of midday, a disappointing morning after a day in which the index gained more than 1,000 by closing bell. Other indices aren't doing much better: The S&P 500 was down by 3.5 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite was down by more than 2 percent.

Meanwhile, the already-volatile bond market became even more turbulent today on news that various world governments, including the United States, are preparing major economic stimulus measures to blunt the virus's financial impact, according to Bloomberg. Sovereign debt rates jumped dramatically overnight as investors began pricing in the massive deficits that countries would accumulate in their efforts to settle an increasingly unruly global economy, amplifying volatility in this normally staid market. U.S Treasury Bills, for example, recorded their biggest jump in yield levels since 1982. The effect of this turmoil will be that borrowing costs for the U.S. government will increase, while the overall economy is weakening, a difficult situation, said CNBC.

While corporate bond sales, buoyed by yesterday's good news, picked up the pace, according to the Financial Times, the sale were mainly from steady market participants such as Pepsi and Verizon, with riskier bets left out in the cold. So long as borrowing remained cheap and credit easy to access, these risky companies were able to keep themselves afloat even in situations that would ordinarily have killed them. Last year, it was estimated that 12 percent of public companies were essentially zombies, kept alive only by being hooked up to an IV of cheap credit. As even strong companies find credit more difficult to access, though, some market watchers are predicting mass defaults in the high-yield (a/k/a junk) bond sector. However, even though strong companies have been able to successfully sell bonds, the Financial Times said these most recent sales have been at higher rates, indicating growing borrowing costs for even these venerable companies.

With this in mind, a recent editorial by former Federal Reserve chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen called for the central bank to follow the suggestion of Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren in asking Congress to allow the Fed to buy corporate debt to shore up the credit market.