First Red Day of 2018 is Laughable

Major US indices had their first negative day of the year on Wednesday, but the losses amounted to nothing more than rounding errors.

Stocks were off early in the day after reports that Japan and China were reducing their purchases of US treasury bonds, but the notion was simply shrugged off by the equity captains as buyers emerged to limit the losses.

Stocks have gain six of the first seven trading days of 2018, a trend that is likely to continue until central banks cease buying stocks outright. This story is getting rather stale, even though most Americans fail to realize that their pensions and 401k profits are being fueled by cash injections from the Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England, People's Bank of China, and, the US Federal Reserve.

To believe that the Fed, being the world's most influential central bank, is not engaged in the purchase of stocks - either outright through their trading desk at the NY Fed or through member banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and others - is to suspend reality.

Global markets have neither seen nor experienced anything like this unprecedented and outrageous activity by financial sources which create money at will, the ramifications of which are likely to result in a massive, destructive inflationary hyper-spiral.

Here in the US and across the pond in Europe, central bankers openly wring their hands and express concern that inflation is too low, when in fact the worldwide money supply - the lone reliable barometer of excess liquidity - has been increased by trillions of dollars during the post-crisis era which began in March of 2009.

Nearly nine years have passed since the great financial crisis and the excesses have only grown, reaching monstrous proportions. For what other reason would gold and silver be suppressed so virulently other than to eliminate their standing as real money? Why are governments so intent on clamping down on cryptocurrencies? Central banks do not want competition in currencies.

It is clear that the central banks of the world have pulled the global economy into a fully fiat regime, printing money backed by nothing at an unprecedented pace.

Future historians and economists - if there is indeed a future at the end of this madness - will look upon this era as one of rampant money creation by policy-makers whose only aim is to keep the failed economies of developed nations in endless debt.

The idea that the Federal Reserve wishes to "normalize" interest rates is a laughable concept. Doing so would only facilitate the ballooning of debt everywhere, to utterly unplayable levels.

Enjoy the ride.

At the Close, Wednesday, January 10, 2018:
Dow: 25,369.13, -16.67 (-0.07%)
NASDAQ: 7,153.57, -10.01 (-0.14%)
S&P 500: 2,748.23, -3.06 (-0.11%)
NYSE Composite: 13,106.60, -14.24 (-0.11%)