Stocks Generally Higher Because the System Works That Way; Fighting the Fed and the Government Is a Not a Strategy; Keep Buying

For the week, the Dow Jones industrial average has lost some 412 points through the close of trading Thursday. Conversely, the NASDAQ is up 374 points, and the S&P is up 60.

WTI futures traded above $74 earlier in the week, but have retreated back to a range around $72 per barrel. There's really not much to see regarding the macro picture. Nothing much has changed.

Stocks continue to trade near all-time highs, a condition that has more or less prevailed for the last three? five? twenty? years. It's kept alive by a combination of excessive government spending, relentless expansion of the money supply by the Fed, and Wall Street hustlers who variably use greed (you can have it all) and fear (FOMO) to encourage anybody with any kind of disposable income to buy stocks.

Those with the most disposable income are the top earners, billionaire hedge fund managers, private offices, and corporate executives themselves, who have benefitted the most from the churning and grinding at the Fed, in Washington, and on Wall Street. Anybody lucky enough to have invested in stocks over the past 20 years or so has made handsome returns and is living the good life.

Naturally, the main element is the Federal Reserve, the central banking authority that is charged with keeping the economy chugging along lik a monetary locomotive, printing money out of thin air and showering it upon the masses. There is literally nothing the people at the Fed would do to restrain credit or money creation. Keeping their counterfeiting operation going is their foremost priority, not full employment or stable prices. Those so called mandates are just for show and the government largely provides more than enough manipulated data to support the claims that the economy is growing, people have jobs and inflation is under control, all laughably spurious arguments.

Because employment and inflation data are control mechanisms of the government, they have been, and will continue to be providing narrative cover for the Fed's printing press. Unemployment figures are fantasies considering the labor force participation rate, currently at all-time lows. GDP is supported by transfer payments. More than half the people in the U.S. welfare-warfare state receive some level of government support, be it welfare checks, food stamps, social security benefits or farm subsidies.

Government polices consist of spending and welfare, a little taxing, and a lot of borrowing. While these conditions would be reprehensible to any honest accountant or economist, they are the strings that pull together the American experience. Pay your taxes, feed your families, and invest whatever you have left over in the stock market. Ignore the huddled masses in tent cities and homeless shelters. The government has them covered and they're not a concern of yours.

This objectionable, twisted form of fascist capitalism will prevail. As earnings season goes into full sprint the next three weeks, the path of least resistance is clearly up, up, and away.

Expect new highs on all the major indices within two weeks because the system, like it or not, works that way. and, as the mobsters say after whacking an operative who has strayed, "there's nothing we could do about it."

Pay no attention to the doomers and gloomers who say that the current condition is unsustainable, that $40 trillion in debt is beyond the pale, that stocks are overdue for a correction. Buy the dips. Buy the rips. Just keep buying.

At the Close, Thursday, July 9, 2026:
Dow: 52,487.41, +139.02 (+0.27%)
NASDAQ: 26,206.89, +336.24 (+1.30%)
S&P 500: 7,543.64, +60.93 (+0.81%)
NYSE Composite: 23,876.84, +86.23 (+0.36%)