Only Wall Street and the benighted hacks who report the news could have been surprised by yesterday’s less-than-momentous announcement from the Fed. The tapeworm will not be implemented after all. What a shocker! As I’ve shouted here repeatedly, merely talking about tapering is enough to send global markets into a dive. But to actually taper — even in small increments?  That would effectively send the financial system into a kamikaze dive.

That said, we shouldn’t fancifully project gold’s rally to infinity, since, when the dust has settled following yesterday’s non-announcement, it’ll be back to business as usual. And that means that strong stimulus — the kind that might conceivably send bullion quotes skyward — will be quite impossible, since interest rates are already effectively at zero.