Friday, August 5, 2011

An interesting day, for sure. But a surprise?  It shouldn’t have been, since even the Guvvamint’s statisticians and spinmeisters seem to have noticed that The Great Recession is back with a vengeance. Under the circumstances, anyone so stupid as to be loaded to the gills with stocks deserved the full brunt of yesterday's devastation.  The stock market’s collapse surely didn’t take us by surprise. The night before, under the headline “This Rally Is….Doomed!” we’d disseminated the following alert to subscribers: “The strong bounce off yesterday’s apparently oversold low is a fraud, and it is doomed, so we’ll have a very strong incentive to short every… rally target we can find…”  We’d also made the following declaration in commentary published here yesterday:  “Lest any of our own readers be shrouded by the fog of the Mainstream Media’s coverage of the financial markets and global economy, we’ll state for the record that the technical evidence is overwhelming that the Mother of All Bear Rallies begun in March of 2009 is over.” If we sound pleased that the market appears, finally, to be having a massive heart attack, it’s because stocks for too long have been the captive of quasi-criminal forces that could charitably be described as pond scum.  The good news is that when the Dow is trading 10,000 points lower in a few years, no longer doing the bidding of high-frequency traders, mountebanks, thimble-riggers, Murphy men and arse bandits, that will set the stage for a true bull market that will run for a generation. At that point, with “money” no longer available interest-free and in practically unlimited quantities for rampant speculation, stocks will rise once again on their individual merits, savings will have a purpose, and capital will seek out its most productive uses. We hope we’re around when all