Dow Pops, Closes At Record Over 30,000; When Will It Hit 40,000? A History Lesson

Dow Jones Industrial Average (Select dates, Closing prices)
March 29, 1999: 10,006.78
February 3, 2017: 20,071.46
November 24, 2020: 30,046.24

On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrials closed over 30,000 for the first time ever. From the numbers above, it's easy to see how fast the 30 select stocks (the makeup of which changes fairly frequently these days) comprising the Average has galloped from one giant number to the next.

On May 26, 1896, two financial reporters, Charles Dow and Edward Jones, first published their average.

It consisted of 12 companies:

American Cotton Oil

American Sugar

American Tobacco

Chicago Gas

Distilling & Cattle Feeding

General Electric

Laclede Gas

National Lead

North American

Tennessee Coal & Iron

U.S. Leather

United States Rubber

...all of which, with the notable exception of General Electric (GE, consequently, not part of the current roster) have been gobbled up, picked apart, merged, liquidated or somehow morphed into some other corporate entity.

So, it took nearly 103 years for the Average to go from the first published value of the Dow Jones, 40.94, which was calculated by taking the average market price for the 12 companies, to 10,000, obviously changing the formula along the way.

Just as a side note, if one were to use the same formula as the originators, simply taking the average price of each of the now 30 component stocks, the number would be - just guessing - somewhere around 120, but that would hardly get anyone excited. Does anybody really want a hat that reads "Dow 100?" Probably not.

Perhaps it's worth taking note of the original calculation of a simple average, but the genius of simplicity is a discussion for another time. Today, we're focused on how fast we can reach the next big number, 40,000.

After bouncing above and below that 10,000 mark for a short time, and, notably dipping below it in 2000 on a number of occasions and then for an extended period of time before and after the tragic events of 9/11/2001, falling as low as 7,286.27 on October 9, 2002, the Dow recovered and was off to the races, well, kind of...

until the sub-prime crisis crashed it all the way down to 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009, the day otherwise known as the "Haines Bottom" after CNBC anchor, Mark Haines (RIP), correctly called the stock market bottom on that very day prior to the open (see video below).

So, then, finally, the Dow was off to the races, crossing again over 10,000 to the upside on October 14, 2009, to eventually reach the legendary level of 20,000 in 2017. Thus, depending on perspective, the Dow took either 19 years (1999-2017) to go from 10 to 20,000, or eight (2009-2017). Either way, it was done in fairly short order, doubling in value.

The next step, from 20,000 to 30,000, took less than four years (3 years, nine months, and 21 days) to complete. While the value of the Average only increased by 50% instead of the 100% in the previous epoch, the move is no less impressive. Mathemeticians may note that at the current trajectory, 40,000 should be within striking distance in about 2 years and 8 months, or roughly speaking, July 17, 2023.

A calculation done on the internet returned a result of 58 years, with this note:

The next number for given series 103,19,4 is 58
General polynomial is 34.5x2-187.5x+256

...whatever that means.

So, for the true pessimists out there, according to at least one website’s calculator, the Average won't hit 40,000 until 2078. The best guess is that it will hit the magic 40,000 mark (and there will be hats available, promise) somewhere between 2023 and 2078. Understand that it is a smaller and smaller percentage gain every 10,000 points. The value of the Dow Average will only gain by 33.3% on a move from 30,000 to 40,000, so doing it in under three years is actually not improbable.

Just to amplify the idea that nothing in the financial world goes up or down in straight lines, as we saw with the bumpy road between 1999 and 2009 (aka, the lost decade), a couple of points:

The bottom in 2009 was actually lower than the one in 2002.

It took 27 years for the Average to recover from the October, 1929 crash, from a high of 381.17 to a low of 41.22 in 1932, and back to a yearly high of 404.39 in 1956.

Back in the world of the real or imagined (take your pick), presumptive president, Joe Biden, has apparently chosen former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, as his presumptive Secretary of the Treasury. Yellen, an uber-dove on monetary policy, is likely to empty the treasury with the same abandon she promoted easy money when Fed Chair. The skies will open up and twenties will fall from the heavens.

Oil prices have skyrocketed above $45 per barrel for WTI crude, the highest price since early March of this year. It's probably nothing more than the idea that, opposed to the whole lockdown COVID preaching, many families are traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, so the oil companies want to get an extra piece of pie. It could be more than that, but it's a good bet that oil prices will fluctuate between $40 and $48 until Christmas and then stabilize near or below that range in 2021.

With stocks booming, a little money leaked out of treasuries, with the 10-year note and 30-year bond yields both higher, by two and four basis points, respectively.

Markets are closed on Thursday, and a half-day session (close at 1:00 pm ET) is scheduled for Friday, so Wednesday is the last full trading day of the week, November closing out the month on Monday. With that, the Labor Department moved it's reading on initial unemployment claims to today, noting 778,000 new unemployment claims in the most recent week.

Happy Thanksgiving!

At the Close, Tuesday, November 24, 2020:
Dow: 30,046.24, +454.97 (+1.54%)
NASDAQ: 12,036.79, +156.15 (+1.31%)
S&P 500: 3,635.41, +57.82 (+1.62%)
NYSE: 14,249.50, +251.26 (+1.79%)

Drive-by Posting Because Markets Are All Rigged to Vaccine Algos

Another Monday, another vaccine announcement, making it three weeks in a row that the COVID crisis has managed to goose stocks higher.

This week it was Astra-Zeneca announcing a COVID vaccine that is supposedly 74% effective against a virus that is 97% infectious. Amazingly, most humans are about as good at math as most farm animals.

No comment on the coming of president Biden and the reincarnation of the Obama administration.

We prepare for the worst.

Sorry for the brevity of this post, but there's no need to waste time figuring out what to do in this market. Buy the dips, buy the rises. Everything is wonderful.

At the Close, Monday, November 23, 2020:
Dow: 29,591.27, +327.79 (+1.12%)
NASDAQ: 11,880.63, +25.66 (+0.22%)
S&P 500: 3,577.59, +20.05 (+0.56%)
NYSE: 13,998.24, +171.24 (+1.24%)

WEEKEND WRAP: Precious Metals and Bitcoin Continue to Pose Risk as Alternatives to National, Fiat Currencies

There is every indication that the time when all is rendered into ashes is rapidly approaching. People with fiat, earning fiat, relying on fiat will be impoverished. A currency collapse with no foreign currency to escape into is a cataclysmic event, the like of which we haven’t seen before, not even in Roman times. If it doesn’t buy you food and warmth a million bucks is worthless.

-- Alisdair Macleod, The Global Reset Scam, GoldMoney.com

It's always about money. Every time. Whether it's politics or medicine or sports or any other human endeavor, it always comes down to a matter of money: who's got it, who wants it, who's holding onto it, who's picking it up.

Nothing in the world - at least at this point in time - happens without money, which is why it's becoming incumbent upon everybody - from the lowest beggar to the highest oligarch - to determine which form of money is the right one to hold, the right one with which to transact, the right one to hoard for future use.

Fiat, the yen, euro, dollar, pound, yuan are all dying, albeit a slow death. Fiat currencies backed by nothing more than empty government promises remain dominant. They're completely useful in terms of everyday living, transactions of all manner, for just about anything and everything. That is unlikely to change in the near term.

While these currencies all are collectively being debased by their respective governments and central banks, their purchasing power continues to erode, though one wouldn't be aware of that watching the Forex pairs like $US-Yen, Euro-Pound, Euro-$US, et cetera. They all go up and down against each other, weakening and strengthening on rumor, suspicion, innuendo, sometimes even facts. At the end of the day, however, they'll all buy less than they did did day before, month before, year before. It takes decades to clearly see the debasing of currencies in terms of inflation, but its been ongoing for at least a century, since the creation of the US Federal Reserve in 1913, and probably before that.

And the inflation continues to advance. What one could buy with one dollar in 1940 cannot be had with $20 today.

In 1940 a gallon of gas was 11 cents. In 1940 the average cost of new car was $850. Today, the national average price for a gallon of gas is $2.11, a new car is close to $40,000. It only took 80 years for the purchasing power of the US dollar to decline by roughly 95%. Obviously, fiat money, based on a system of fractional reserve banking reliant on endless debt issuance isn't working for everybody. The top 0.1% of Americans has more accumulated wealth than the bottom 80%. It's working for them, not for nearly everybody else.

When a currency stops being an effective means of preserving wealth for huge swaths of people - at which the fiat currencies have failed miserably - poverty ensues. Lines of cars miles long are now typical at food banks across the country. The mainstream media - reliable purveyors of truth that they are - won't show the poverty and even if they do, they'll blame it on the coronavirus, and eventually on President Trump. That's just how they roll.

The matter of fact is that the US middle class has been strip-mined and hollowed out, plunging millions of people into poverty or week-to-week, even day-to-day scratching out of an existence. They're turning to begging, barter, selling off what few assets they may have, prostitution, crime. By whatever means available, they all need to eat.

Not to belabor the point, but homelessness would be rising even more rapidly than it already is without mandated eviction moratoria and foreclosure forbearance rules imposed by states and the federal government during the "pandemic," many of which are expiring soon. US household debt reached an all-time high in the third quarter, $14.35 trillion. Nearly $10 trillion of that is in mortgages, with new and existing home prices at record highs and interest rates near record lows. Sustainable? Probably not.

When a currency implodes, the usual characteristics are runaway inflation caused by easy money policies, joblessness, credit defaults, bankruptcies, evictions, small business failures, boarded up storefronts, homelessness, general poverty. Sound familiar? We are there.

If all of these problems are the end result of a currency that works to enrich the few at the expense of the many, what do ordinary people do?

Here are a few options: protest, riot, burn, loot, fight, commit crimes, starve, die. Lovely.

For the rest of us lucky enough to have some means to continue making a living or having enough cash and/or liquid assets to survive reasonably well, he time to start looking for alternative currencies was yesterday, last month, last year, last decade, last century. We should have known we were doomed when Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, but most of us weren't economists nearly 50 years ago. Those of us who were even adults at the time were in our teens, 20s and 30s. We were more concerned about making the scene at the newest disco, making headway at work, finding a mate, raising a family. Now we're mostly retired, watching our world collapse right before our eyes.

For the bulk of people born after 1965, the economy of the past 50 years is all they know. They're largely unprepared for what's happening and what's to come. Some of the millennials get it. Generation Z gets it. They don't hold out much hope for the future. Many have turned to Bitcoin while old-timers have turned to gold, silver, and real estate.

As far as land is concerned, it's not the most liquid of assets, but it does serve the purpose of having stability, a place to live, a place from which to run a business. Beyond that, it's sunk money, a long-term necessity.

Gold, silver, and Bitcoin are going to win out over any government issued currency, be it fiat US dollars from the Federal Reserve or a new currency that's 100% digital, or in central banker lingo, CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), which is all the rage in the conference rooms frequented by these preposterous imposters of monetary witchcraft.

Years ago, after the sub-prime crisis of 2007-09 nearly bankrupted all the major banks and destroyed the global economy (it did, it's just been papered over since then), Money Daily posited that the next crisis would be more destructive by degrees and likely the last crisis. We are there. It's just taking longer than anyone expected.

When the US dollar goes poof for good, it's going to be bad for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people, because, as the quote at the top of this article says, "If it doesn’t buy you food and warmth a million bucks is worthless."

*****

Stocks split the difference for the week, the Dow and S&P, after reaching all-time highs, quickly retreated, ending the week on the downside. The NASDAQ and NYSE Composite managed gains. Everything was minimized, amounting to nothing. Everybody's waiting for some resolution to the presidential situation, dealing with COVID-related nonsense, thinking about Thanksgiving or not caring about anything.

Wall Street types continue to be focused on pushing equity prices higher and they've done a swell job in 2020, considering the multiple challenges they faced. Maybe it's time for them to sell, or to tell other people to sell. Maybe not.

Bonds are signaling that all is not well with the system. The 10-year and 30-year treasury yields remain stubbornly high, as they have been now for the past five weeks. Money flowed back into the safety of fixed income over the past week, pushing yields down. The 10-year note dropped six pasis points, from 0.89 to 0.83%, while the 30-year dropped 12, falling from 1.65 to 1.53%. While not indicative of a trend (yet), investors are looking to lock in longer yields that are essentially losing bets with real negative yields as inflation is running at least at two to three percent.

Bond sleuths surmise that it's better to lose a percent or two or three to inflation than 10 to 20 percent in equities. At least with heavy exposure to long-dated maturities, the pain will be somewhat less than that of peers in stocks. While the longest-dated bond yields have taken off, the shorter end of the treasury curve remains flat. Everything prior to a five-year maturity is essentially trading at the zero-bound.

What's spooking the bond market has probably more to do with equity valuations than politics or medical issues. Even the announcement of two COVID vaccines coming to the rescue shortly has not apparently sufficiently allayed fears to any significant extent. With forecasts of holiday retail spending looking pallid and stocks at stretched prices one can hardly blame money managers for seeking shelter. Unemployment, productivity, and industrial production data seems to be pointing more to a prolonged recession rather than a quick, one-off, V-shaped recovery.

Oil prices ended the week at a two-month high ($42.42), putting in a solid gain of over two dollars a barrel from the previous Friday price of $40.13.

Precious metals are just so obviously manipulated by a consortium of banks and dealers at the LBMA and at the futures trading hub, COMEX, it's hard to to laugh, or cry, or puke out one's guts.

Gold ended the week at 1,872.40, down $12.80 from the prior Friday. Silver fell from $24.77 to finish the week at $24.36. The "consolidation" (see spoofing, cheating, naked shorting) in the precious metals over the past two months is nothing short of criminal, as traders at JP Morgan can attest.

The most recent prices for common gold and silver items sold on eBay (numismatics excluded, shipping (often free) included) are shown below:

Item: Low / High / Average / Median
1 oz silver coin: 32.50 / 55.00 / 39.77 / 36.75
1 oz silver bar: 29.05 / 43.30 / 33.54 / 33.02
1 oz gold coin: 1,890.00 / 2,054.25 / 1,979.26 / 1,984.13
1 oz gold bar: 1,915.00 / 1,990.59 / 1,969.30 / 1,975.25

In the eBay sampling, the presence of more and more numismatics - especially in silver and gold coins - has been prevalent for the past four weeks, while premiums remain high. Sellers are getting extremely good prices on numismatic (proof, high grade, low mintage) coins and bars while prices have declined overall, the desired effect of the controlling hands in the futures and spot markets.

Anecdotally, a good number of gold-focused internet reporting sites mention increased buying of bulk gold tonnage by central banks. Speculation is that banks are bolstering their gold reserves in anticipation of an economic event that will change the financial order significantly. Otherwise, nothing out of the ordinary in precious metals. Banks continue to pressure price lower while small, independent buyer demand has skyrocketed, a trend effective over the past nine months and counting.

Finally, Bitcoin continues to march toward all-time levels in price. The price, in US$, of one Bitcoin reached a high of $18,980.00 on November 20 and has retreated from there. As of this writing, the price in US$ is $17968.81. Wild swings in price are nothing new to Bitcoiners. A year ago, the price was $7283.19, a month ago, $12,988.20.

What to make of the recent rise in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? The global dominance of fiat currencies has nearly run its course and alternatives are being sought. The rise of Bitcoin is not by chance. It is fast approaching its all-time high, measured in US$ of $19,891.99 from December 16, 2017. Advocates for the original cryptocurrency believe that further adoption by the general public and widespread use as a means of exchange are within reach, probably two to five years out.

Bitcoin's price is determined by demand, which is increasing. Of 22 million Bitcoins total, 18.6 million have been mined, making the supply now somewhat stable. Bitcoin's market cap of $335.8 billion remains minuscule by comparison to fiat currencies, though it is approaching silver's. Price appreciation is expected as long as central banks continue debasing fiat. The process will likely take longer than most people have the patience for, but holders of alternatives will eventually be winners. All unbacked, fiat currencies have met the same fate - every one - of eventually returning to their intrinsic value of zero.

At the Close, Friday, November 20, 2020:
Dow: 29,263.48, -219.75 (-0.75%)
NASDAQ: 11,854.97, -49.74 (-0.42%)
S&P 500: 3,557.54, -24.33 (-0.68%)
NYSE: 13,827.00, -36.23 (-0.26%)

For the Week:
Dow: -216.33 (-0.73%)
NASDAQ: +25.69 (+0.22%)
S&P 500: -27.61 (0.77%)
NYSE: +65.68 (+0.48%)

Trump Legal Team Presents Evidence, Media Ignores; Nothing Else Matters

"American patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level to the highest level of our government," she said. "We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down. We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom."

-Sidney Powell, attorney for President Donald J. Trump

At some point, people have to realize that the stock market doesn't matter, COVID-19 doesn't matter, schools being closed, wearing or not wearing masks, and who you voed for doesn't matter if elections aren't fairly held, transparent, and uncompromized.

What has happened in this country is that the quest for money and power has clouded the collective judgement of politicians and powerful people in the media to a point at which corruption in politics is the norm and the media has failed at every opportunity to present the truth to the American public, whether the public is comfortable with it or not.

This is not a matter of party politics, of Democrats or Republicans, because the corruption has spread so deeply into all levels of government. Greed and avarice This is a matter of national importance. Americans are either going to have a country or they're not. Nothing else matters. One either stands for the rule of law or one doesn't. When Joe Biden claimed this election was "for the soul of the nation" he was, perhaps not accidentally, speaking the truth. America's soul is being tested. President Trump's legal team has made the claim that there was a concerted, organized effort to subvert the honest results of November's elections through illegal means.

Those claims need to be investigated and the media needs to keep the American public informed. Neither of those things are happening. The FBI isn't investigating. The media isn't reporting. If it wasn't for President Trump's dogged determination to seek justice and truth and his legal team's efforts to investigate and litigate, America might very well end up no better than corrupt regimes like Venezuela, Cuba, or communist China.

It's well past time to hold people accountable for their actions and prosecute them for their crimes. Informed Americans who are protesting and begging for answers, for justice, have had enough. They've paid attention, found alternate sources of information, and they do not like what they are seeing.

On it's surface, the idea that Joe Biden, who only captured the Democrat nomination because all the other candidates bowed out, leaving only Biden and leftist independent Bernie Sanders in the bulk of the primaries, chose a vice presidential candidate - Kamala Harris - who never polled greater than five percent in any of the early primaries, who spent the majority of the campaign between August and November sheltered away in his basement, never drawing significant crowds at any of his events, to believe that Biden would receive more votes than any candidate in history stands reality on its head and invites the public to engage in mass delusions.

Only with the aid of the mainstream media has Joe Biden managed to stay out of prison and maintain the stature of a presidential candidate. The media refused to even acknowledge the existence of his son Hunter's laptop, which contained damning evidence of corruption, fraud, bribery and influence peddling even though the original reporting was obtained and revealed by the New York Post, the nation's fourth-largest newspaper in circulation. Social media giants Twitter and Facebook scrubbed mention of the story, censoring it and closing accounts of people and organizations who dared expose the truth.

Joe Biden didn't win the election. He's lucky he hasn't been arrested and thrown in prison. Donald J. Trump won the election. There is no doubt of this. Trump's rallies were attended by tens of thousands of people with more thousands unavailable to gain entry because of the massive crowd size. Trump's supporters were enthusiastic. Biden's supporters - the few that could even be found - were not excited about their selected candidate.

To some, the claims made by Trump's legal team may sound fantastic and unbelievable. To be sure, to think that any group of individuals or collective or organizations would attempt to steal a national election in what's supposed to be the most free and democratic country on the face of the planet, stretches the imagination, but that's what happened.

Democrats, aided and abetted by deep state operatives in the CIA and FBI who either stood down or assisted in corrupt, illegal election practices, helped by the mainstream media which peddalled false stories of corruption and collusion with Russia and Ukraine, supported the phony Mueller investigation, pushed hard for impeachment, have been trying to get rid of Donald J. Trump from the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. They failed to keep him from the Republican nomination. They failed to keep him from winning the presidency in 2016, and they were so afraid they would fail again in 2020, they resorted to cheating and subverting the will of the American people by rigging the vote.

They have failed again and President Trump's legal team are exposing them and the president will eventually prevail. Elections in most, if not all of the states they are contesting - Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and possibly New Mexico and Virginia - will be overturned, either by state or federal circuit courts, or the Supreme Court, or the election will thrown to the congress where the president will prevail.

Until the 2020 elections are resolved, there is no other story that even approaches its importance. It is the duty of every American to stay informed and focused on finding out the truth, not the lame denials and cries of "false claims" or "debunked" by the mainstream media, and to demand the truth, to demand honesty and the rule of law.

If Americans cannot be relied upon to seek justice and truth, then there is no point in elections. eJust tear up the constitution and let the people with the most money, or the most influence, or the most dirt on their opponents, rule the land and bow to the annointed kings, queens, princes, and princesses. That is not what America is about. We cannot allow our constitution to be shredded, our traditions to be bastardized, lamented, destroyed. We cannot allow our country to be taken over by people who seek to enslave and imprison all of us.

Below is the press conference held by President Trump's legal team on Thursday. If you can't devote some time to view at least some of it, at least understand that it was not aired by ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, FOX, CNN, PBS, and the Washington Post, New York Times and Associated Press coverage consisted of an utterly unconvincing, laughably insipid "fact-checking" article that proved nothing other than the media is still aligned against the president.

If the president and his legal team are engaged in some kind of fantasy witch hunt, if they have no evidence as the media continues to falsely claim, then why don't they roll the tape, let it all hang out. After all, they hate President Trump with a passion. Here they have the perfect opportunity to make him look like a fool, a cheat, a liar, a hater, a racist. Why won't they report any of it? Why? Why? Why?

At the Close, Thursday, November 19, 2020:
Dow: 29,483.23, +44.81 (+0.15%)
NASDAQ: 11,904.71, +103.11 (+0.87%)
S&P 500: 3,581.87, +14.08 (+0.39%)
NYSE: 13,863.23, +54.58 (+0.40%)

Presidential Tide Turning Toward Trump; Markets Shaky As Vaccine News Is Overwhelmed

Just to be on point, Money Daily will provide an overview of the continuing contested presidential election in order to offer readers some perspective. The scope of this ongoing conflict is far greater than can be covered adequately by this blog. Readers are advised to seek out credible sources for information. Mainstream media sources, specifically, network television: NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, PBS and FOX; and newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post should not be relied upon for accurate, honest information as they have proven repeatedly to be extremely biased against President Trump.

Accurate, unbiased reporting is available on the internet and on some talk radio shows. Money Daily will continue to stay abreast of developments as they occur.

Overnight, Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann filed affidavits to rescind their votes for certification of the county's 2020 election results. Wayne County, Michigan includes the city of Detroit, which voted heavily in favor of Joe Biden for president.

Meanwhile, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmore may be facing impeachment charges shortly over her re-institution of lockdown orders, in violation of Supreme Court orders.

In Georgia's ongoing "retally", some votes have been found in favor of President Trump, but not enough to challenge Biden's 12,000-vote lead.

The audit is not an official recount, which can still happen after the state certifies their election results at the request of a candidate within a .5% margin. That’s why it’s being called a retally or hand count.

The official recount - using the vote tabulation machines - could begin next week. Campaigns will have until Tuesday to make their requests. It is likely that the Trump camp will request an audit as many irregularities have been reported by observers. This story is still developing.

There are ongoing contests and lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. Wisconsin has approved a request by President Trump for a recount in Milwaukee and Dane counties.

Joe Biden carried Wisconsin by 20,608 votes and he won Dane and Milwaukee counties by a more than 2-to-1 margin. Milwaukee county includes the city of Milwaukee and Dane, the city of Madison. They are the two most populous counties in the state. The process is supposed to be completed by December 1, but both sides agree that whatever the outcome, the matter will end up in court.

At the bottom of the disputed election is whether or not there was coordinated fraud committed by the media-annointed winner, Joe Biden. The Trump team has been filing lawsuits in jurisdictions around the country and gathering evidence of potential fraud, voting irregularities, ballot harvesting and tampering, physical evidence, sworn affidavits, witness accounts, and are pursuing allegations that votes were switched from Trump to Biden on voting machines supplied by Dominion, a Canadian company, via software installed by a company known as Smartmatic.

In December 2019, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar and congressman Mark Pocan warned about reports of machines "switching votes," "undisclosed vulnerabilities," and "improbable" results that "threaten the integrity of our elections."

Establishment media are falsely calling presumptive winner, Joe Biden, "president elect," a complete misnomer as a candidate can only be called "president elect" after certification by electors from the 50 states. That has not happened. Certification by the presidential and vice-presidential electors is scheduled for December 14.

What's occurring now behind the scenes is the collection of massive amounts of evidence by Trump's legal team, expecting the case to go to the Supreme Court. In such event, absolute proof, as is necessary in criminal matters, is not needed, as the election dispute is a civil matter. Trump's lawyers only need to reach a bar of "preponderance of evidence" that President Trump was disenfranchised by fraudulent practices to prevail.

Even if the Supreme Court does not reach a verdict in favor of President Trump, the matter could well end up in congress, where a vote would be taken, decided by each state's representation in the House of Representatives with each state getting a single vote. Republicans hold House majorities in 26 states, to 22 Democratic majorities, so, a vote along party lines would swing the election to President Trump. The Senate would likely go to Trump as well. Each Senator casts one vote. The voting would be carried out by the newly-elected (2020) congress.

In financial news, stocks tumbled on Wednesday, with the Dow suffering its worst loss in three months as vaccine news was outflanked by uncertainty over the presidential election outcome and knock-on effects of lockdowns and restrictions in various states reporting increases in cases of CV-19.

As of Thursday morning, stocks in Asian markets were generally lower, and European stocks are down across the board thought the losses are, as of this writing, less than one percent.

The Labor department reported another 742,000 Americans filed initial jobless claims last week. Food banks in Texas report being overwhelmed and other states are reporting record numbers using food banks as poverty spirals out of control.

Equity futures point to a lower US open.

At the Close, Wednesday, November 18, 2020:
Dow: 29,438.42, -344.93 (-1.16%)
NASDAQ: 11,801.60, -97.74 (-0.82%)
S&P 500: 3,567.79: -41.74 (-1.16%)
NYSE: 13,808.65, -140.45 (-1.01%)