Traditionally, Crime Family pundits measure stock market declines by percentage gradients. Any dip under 5% is a normal market fluctuation, 5% to not yet 20% a correction, and 20% or more your dreaded Bear Market. This time our tormentors have added a new one. Anything over 15% on the way to 20% is The End of Days. Unable to label the extant falloff ursine, our tormentors are hell bent on flagellating us with cruelty way beyond applicable.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 12,876.00. 15% below that was 10.944.60, and 20% would be 10,300.80, if you want to keep score.
Our astute Post readers may have noticed that so far The End of Days can’t be attributed to anything that's actually happened. On the one hand, 1) conjecture that some as yet unspecified thing over in some as yet unspecified European country might get bad enough to create some as yet unspecified dire banking event, and on the other, 2) an imagined threat that the recent slowing in economic growth here might spawn a double-dip recession, are pretty much it.
Growing at a reduced rate is nowhere near shrinking in aggregate size. It’s wildly irresponsible for Gangland mouthpieces to make this leap. And that European balderdash is simply the same old, same old. The classic bank failure argument that Wall Street con artists pull out whenever the Dons smell blood.
One headline really caught our eye though. A pair of fortune tellers saw a 1 in 3 chance of another recession in their tea leaves. Soon after, another crystal ball gazer put that at 1 in 2 ½.
Where do they get these guys anyway? We’d love to audit the math behind those fabrications. Just give our profession some financial reform with teeth, and we’ll put those dillies behind bars for as long as the law allows. Securities fraud has never been more blatant. Why the Crime Families are empowered to get away with calamari like that is beyond us.
All the SEC has to do is pick up a newspaper and walk it over to the judge. “Jeeze, you think this is a scare tactic, Your Honor? You know, trying to terrify the 401(k) crowd out of stocks at lows so the hucksters can lure these marks back in later at highs.”
“Here’s your search warrant. Go grab the spreadsheets. I’ll hang the s#ns#fb!tch%s in the morning.”
Please, somebody, just give us the laws.
Anyway, in a different life, we did a study showing that the stock market predicted something like 15 out of the last 5 recessions. In other words, there’s only a 1 in 3 chance that any given short-selling attack should’ve ever taken place.
(How many of those recessions were caused by short-sellers crushing consumer confidence, we’ll never know. Maybe our odds would improve to 1 in 15 if we didn’t give the Families the chance to short-sell prosperity away.)
1 in 3 and 1 in 3. Same thing. We like our perspective better though. For one thing, it’s not a moneyplucking lie. These perps are given the right to destroy financial assets with play shares, and rely on wagging their tongues to pull off the sting.
The persons of interest here belong in jail. Whole cashsucking pack of them.
Them and all their tutti-frutti economists too.
