Plunge Protection Team Rescues Stocks

Take a good look at the chart on the right because you're sure to see similar examples in the near future. It is a classic example of sad, clueless, old Republican money attempting to rescue the stock market from a certain death. These are largely the same people who stole the presidency in 200 and 2004 and just last night stole the New Hampshire primary for Hillary Clinton (yes, the Clintons are nothing but brutal, slow, decadent Republicans wearing Democrat's clothes, and Hillary is far easier to defeat than a black man named Obama).

This is what happens when fascism takes hold in a country, in a stock market, in a people. The patterns become unmistakable, yet no one but the truly enlightened dare to even question. And then they are characterized as bizarre, weird, strange, deranged.

With any luck, the Dow Jones Industrials would have closed below 12,500 on Wednesday, but luck had little to do with the outcome of the day's trading. Old money, Fed money, your money was spent to make it appear that all is well, that the economy is just chugging along quite well, thank you.

Dow 12,735.31 +146.24; NASDAQ 2,474.55 +34.04; S&P 500 1,409.13 +18.94; NYSE Composite 9,424.69 +98.61

The opposite is closer to the truth. More voices, including that of Goldman Sachs senior economist Jan Hatzius, are beginning to sing in the chorus that the US may already be in a recession. Today, he joined the crowd, which already includes voices from Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Earnings Whispers, and former Bush administration economist (and one of the authors of the Bush tax cuts) Martin Feldstein, who thinks the economy may still be able to avoid a full-blown recession.

Compare and contrast that sentiment with that of St. Louis Fed President William Poole, who said that 2008 looked to be a year of rising growth and that low inflation expectations give the Fed "breathing room.

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Poole may actually be mouthing some truth, as he failed to mention any specifics. Certainly, if the 4th quarter of 2007 shows negative growth of say, -1% and the 1st quarter of 2008 is another negative -2%, if the economy actually grows by 1% in each of the succeeding quarters, then he's technically right, though Q4 '07 and Q1 '08 would still qualify as a recession.

As for "low inflation", it's apparent that Mr. Poole neither does the family grocery shopping nor fills up the family car with gas. In other words, he's nothing short of a liar.

I'm not just whistling in the dark about the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), less known as the President's Working Group on Financial Markets. This group, which includes the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary and other top administration officials, uses real money (printed on government printing presses), channeled through brokerages such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and others, to pump index futures when stocks are poised to collapse, such as happened today.

To get a better understanding of how dire the situation as at 2:30 pm today, declining issues were leading advancers by a 2-1 margin, but after the pumping, finished with a slight edge for the advancers, 3458-2957. The real story was in the new highs/new lows measure, where new lows expanded to an alarming 1384, to just 97 new highs. In other words, about 1 in 4 stocks recorded a new 52-week low today.

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The price of crude eased a bit today, shedding 66 cents to $95.67, while gold and silver recorded marginal gains. The close of $881.70/ounce was another record for gold.

The stakes are high in the perception game and the powers that be will stop at nothing to obfuscate the all-too-obvious truths about the general welfare of the economy. Pumping billions of dollars into markets to avoid orderly selling is only one of their weapons. There will be more jawboning from the Fed, mushy statistics, rate cuts and maybe, if they become desperate enough, a terrorist attack or war with Iran to divert attention away from the failing economy.

Eventually, however, even central bankers cannot stop the forces of the global economy and the markets will either erode slowly and quietly or in a massive, sudden catastrophic collapse. For now, it seems, the manipulators in the government prefer the latter.

NYSE Volume 5,351,031,000
NASDAQ Volume 2,894,973,500