Tag Archives: Financial markets

Inflationism Has Overturned Society, by MN Gordon

If you were alive for the entirety of human history and you bet against every single government maintaining the value of its money, you’d be batting 1000. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Every now and again, when a sense of doom falls suddenly upon them, the bulls turn to bears.  That is to say, they turn from buying stocks to selling.  What is it that prompts them to panic?  What turns emotions so quickly from greed to fear?

The answers to these questions come a dime a dozen.  You can certainly dream up answers that are at least as good as anything professional analysts put forward.  The most convincing answers, whether true or not, are often those tied to current events.

For example, on Monday stocks sold off.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped 410 points.  The popular rationale was that stocks sold off because of gridlock in Congress over passing a new stimulus bill.  On Tuesday the DJIA was up 113 points.  Apparently, this was because stimulus talks were back on.

But that was before Wednesday, when the DJIA dropped 97 points because the imminent stimulus agreement was still imminent.  Then, on Thursday, the DJIA jumped 152 points because stimulus talks were getting warmer.

Do you see the connection?  Do you see the correlation?  Does it imply causation?  Or is it all a great game of chasing the wild goose?

Moreover, what if the new coronavirus bailout bill passes, but it’s only $1.9 trillion?  Is that less bullish for stocks than a $2.2 trillion handout package?  These are the sorts of inane questions one must ask in a world where the stock market’s been corrupted by government intervention.

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Market Friday: Can’t Hide the Deflation When Deflation is the Plan, by Tom Luongo

The markets are hoping Trump wins reelection. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

While we were all distracted by the Kabuki Theater of the first ‘debate’ between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday the bigger event was simply the turning of the calendar from September to October.

What is painful about so much market commentary is that it is focused on price. The Dow went up, huzzah! The dollar fell, huzzah?!

But prices are nothing without time. And most prices are meaningless. The only ones that truly matter are the ones we know definitively for any given period of time — Open, High, Low, Close.

Everything else is noise and errata.

So, the calendar shifting from September to October creates another opportunity to aggregate all the noise of two different time periods, one month and one quarter-year, and assess what people actually thought of the Dow or the dollar or Tesla or a micro-cap furniture company in Saigon.

Given the extreme political landscape, central bankers who have no answers and the obvious push for a remaking of society through the fear-mongering over COVID-19 this quarterly close may be one of the most important in the history of financial markets.

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