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No Relief
As I said on yesterday’s podcast, I did not we had a “Wall Street Relief Rally”, based on the stand down or truce in the trade war following the backtracking by the Fed on the potential number of rate hikes and the distance we were from neutrality.
Interest Rates Anything But Neutral
By the way, yesterday I referred to the rate hikes as normal; I should have said neutral – obviously what we have now is not even close to being normal. The Fed is trying to convince us that the new “neutral” rate of interest is now lower than what was considered neutral in the past. Why is that? Because we have such an enormous amount of debt now, the Fed has to keep interest rates much lower in order to achieve neutrality. But, of course, if the Fed needs to keep interest rates low, it’s not neutral. Those low interest rates are actually stimulative. What the Fed is trying to do is use artificially low interest rates to prop up the economy and then claim that those artificially low rates are neutral. They’re anything but neutral. They are accommodative. This is cheap money, this easy money, and ultimately it is going to set off massive inflation.
A Terrible Day, Technically
Nobody seems to understand that yet, but that’s what’s coming. People are continuing to be complacent despite today’s substantial drop in the value of stocks. Today the Dow was down just shy of 800 points – 799 points. At the lows, it was down over 800. We didn’t close on the exact low; maybe they’re going to somehow claim that that was a rally or something – the fact that we closed slightly off the lows. This was a terrible day, technically, and in fact I mentioned again on yesterday’s podcast, the fact that the market made the highs on the open – it did not trade very well, and it looked to me that we would fall down. I did not know that we would drop this much this quickly, but it doesn’t surprise me.
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