As a sideshow, Jackson Hole is pretty convenient. It usually allows the stuffed shirts which generally populate the world of finance, get into flannels and jeans out in the wild. Well, not so much this year.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell set the agenda with his keynote address, signaling that the Fed is hellbent on creating inflation, targeting two percent, even if they have to go beyond it sometimes. It's not enough that the Fed has the following programs already operating on the US economy (killing it while boosting stock prices):
- Primary Dealer Credit Facility
- Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility
- Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility
- Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility
- Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
- Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility
- Main Street Lending Program
That's a lot of facilities. They need one more: a hospital facility to house the mentally ill economists running the world's currencies and businesses into the ground.
The Fed has gone full retard on inflation, which benefits who exactly. Most people don't really insist on higher prices all the time. Lower prices would be a welcome change, but, in the Fed's mind, the part of their mandate being price stability is somehow interpreted as two percent inflation. Yes, full retard. They'll soon be sending money directly to corporations negatively affected by not just COVID-19, but just about anything.
The Fed's message is crystal clear and applies to everything from food to consumer goods to houses to stocks:
BUY NOW BEFORE PRICES GO UP!
As far as full retard mode being in effect, the Fed and Wall Street may have to take a back seat to professional sports. Not only has the NBA pretty much destroyed any remaining shred of credibility by cancelling playoff games Wednesday night, they topped that off by cancelling (postponing) three more playoff games on Thursday. Not to be outdone, players from 14 MLB teams caused the postponement of seven games, including the scheduled Thursday night national telecast on Fox of the Phillies-Nationals game.
Not that anybody cared much. The Phillies are sub-.500, while the Nationals - last season's World Series winners - are in last place in the NL East. No fans were affected since MLB is still not allowing any fan presence at any games. Plenty of other games - like the WNBA, which nobody watches anyway - were also cancelled.
All of these protests are over the shooting of a black man who was in violation of an order of protection, threatening an ex-girlfriend and upon whom restraint and tasers had already failed, was trying to get inside his car to retrieve a knife for some reason, after police had told him not to enter the car and had guns drawn. Some guy named Jacob or something. We are supposed to honor criminal behavior now?
Well, that's why sports players play sports. Most of them are too stupid to do anything meaningful. If they protest and "boycott" their own games, for which they are paid ridiculous sums of money, maybe the owners will just lay them all off, cancel the whole season, dissolve the leagues and go into some other business where the workers don't stage revolutions every two weeks.
Thankfully, the weekend is upon us and we can all relax(?) for a few days, unless there's a pandemic, hurricane, cop shooting or something else to set people off on looting and rioting. It's kind of like that old hockey joke: "I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out," except this time, it's "I went to a basketball game and a protest broke out."
Yikes. We're screwed.
At the Close, Thursday, August 27, 2020:
Dow: 28,492.27, +160.37 (+0.57%)
NASDAQ: 11,625.34, -39.76 (-0.34%)
S&P 500: 3,484.55, +5.82 (+0.17%)
NYSE: 13,068.81, +26.31 (+0.20%)
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