No Stopping the Industrial Giants

The stock markets are rigged. There, I said it. somebody mentioned that Goldman Sachs handles 20% of all the trades on the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges. I tend to believe that, especially considering how one-sided the markets have become over the past two months.

It's a one-way bet, just like it was during the post-9/11 era, or, actually, as soon as the Iraq war began. Everything just keeps going up.

Now, I have nothing against profitable trading, I just think profits should be made by investing in companies with good fundamentals, growing earnings, dividends, things like that. The biggest leaders of the recent climb have been banks, many of which were on the brink of failure just a few months back, and were saved by infusions of cash from taxpayers.

That's not what I call sustainable or sound business. Eventually, I will be found to have been right all along. It will become apparent that Citigroup and Bank of America are insolvent. That JP Morgan has too much derivative exposure that they don't like to talk about, and that Goldman Sachs does manipulate the market at the behest of the Federal Reserve, itself a chimera of an organization, one which creates currency out of thin air. How can that be a viable business?

Others agree with me that the "dead cat bounce" has been overdone. Here's one.

Then there's talk of Social Security and Medicare going belly-up before they're supposed to. Well, even the idea that they are going to go broke should be cause enough to reform or dispose of these awful entitlements which are bankrupting the country, turning productive people and resources into wards of the state and, though they provide capital into the system, are nothing more than the manifestation of the worst form of the welfare state.

Dow 8,469.11, +50.34 (0.60%)
NASDAQ 1,715.92, -15.32 (0.88%)
S&P 500 908.35, -0.89 (0.10%)
NYSE Composite 5,859.14, +9.84 (0.17%)

Yesterday, I was reporting how the NASDAQ stocks fared much better than their counterpart indices. Today the opposite is the case, with Dow stocks leading the way. So, which is it? Old, stodgy industrials or new-age tech companies at which we should be throwing our money? Neither is likely the case. Gold or silver will outperform them both, as they have for the past five years.

Just to confuse matters further on one of the more confounding sessions of late, declining issues dominated advancers, 3885-2650. New lows: 73; New highs: 38. Volume was light.

NYSE Volume 1,611,161,000
NASDAQ Volume 2,529,090,000

The government continues to borrow and spend at a record-shattering pace. Americans will be paying through their eyeteeth until their dying breath just for the money being wasted trying to prevent the economy falling into an orderly and well-deserved depression. All they're doing is delaying the inevitable and making matters worse. The luckiest people on the planet today are those who know they don't have long to live. They won't be around to witness or deal with the devastation.

Crude oil was up another 35 cents, to $58.69, but gold gained more, rising $10.40, to $923.90. Silver shot up another 31 cents, to $14.22. They're probably all overpriced, but especially oil. When PPI and CPI figures are released later this week, there's likely to be some pull-back in all commodity prices. The economy is still just puttering along at a snail's pace. Growth is more than 9 months away.

Bonds were unmoved and the dollar was descending last we noticed.