Chart Review by Michael Clark
“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”
– John Maynard Keynes
SO, IS THIS FINALLY THE ‘REAL’ CORRECTION?
What a week it was. The Bears gave the Bulls some payback. Obama got a wake-up call. And the banks got a well-deserved scare (and we hope they will get a well-deserved hair cut).
The markets reacted, as one might expect, with selling. Actually, the selling began before the Massachusetts election and before Obama sent a shot across the Goldman Sach’s bow. Last week Intel announced surprisingly strong earnings; and the stock started up and then sank. For the past half-year investor behavior had been the reverse: a buying spree for any stock that did not lose as much as it might have — beating ‘Street expectations’ that had been dumbed down over and over again during a quarter so that the company could report ’surprising’ strength. Suddenly, now, even good earnings are being greeted with selling. Then came Massachusetts — wasn’t that a Bee Gees’ song?
All the lights went out in Massachusetts
Anyway, readers want to know where the markets stand today, after the sell-off this week. My view of it — my ‘view’, not my gut-feeling — is that we are, so far, merely correcting from an over-extended rally. This rally has been bizarre, to say the least. This has been a ‘fear rally’ — usually the ‘fear’ side of the equation is when selling comes in, ‘greed’ driving the expansion. But fear of systemic failure has driven this rally; and Ben Bernannke has been the captain sailing the ‘Boat of Fear’, Ben’s logic — that more debt will solve the insolvency crisis — has a shadow side, the logic that a collapse in stock prices will result in systemic failure, international chaos, revolution, repression…made him believe that preservation of the status quo was requiired, at any price. A ‘make-believe’ recovery could be jump-started, perhaps, if the Fed could just stimulate (and simulate) another asset-bubble. After all – that is how his mentor and predecessor, Alan Greenspan, had become the darling of the coctail party crowd, leading member of Time Magazine’s ‘Committee to Save the World’; and that was how he, himself, had become Time’s ‘Peson of the Year’.
Logic was thrown out the window. Causality no longer mattered. More debt might cure the problem of too much debt? …