This Stock Market Crash is for Real

They are telling us that this loss in value of stock prices was the biggest three day loss in history or something like 1.400 points.  And was the biggest one day swing in prices ever for the DJI, and also it’s the sharpest increase in volatility in history.  To the prudent this means the market means business; this is not some kind of a “correction” flook.  It spells major trouble ahead.  I would put all these signs together and conclude along with Shawn Hannity and Norman Goldman that the stock market is no place for amitures.  Of course Judy agreed with that two years ago but the last time I suggested they get out of the market and sell everything they said, “Oh, we have a stock expert and we trust him”.  So does this stock expert have a magic wand that you can wave it and make the 1,400 point drop go away?   Countless times in my postings since mid January I’ve been almost taunting my readers to get out of the stock market with expressions like “What are you waiting for.  Now is the perfect time”.    Of course now that we’re a couple thousand points lower “Now” doesn’t have quite the appealing ring to it that it did a few weeks ago. 

Joe Biden is moving closer to deciding to run for President.  He’s met with Elizabeth Warren and met with the President.  According to Mark Stein and others, Barock Obama secretly favors Biden and says “Picking him for VP was the smartest political decision I ever made.  I’ve always regarded Biden’s running as only a minor possibility.  We hear he is ‘More likely to run now” but he still hasn’t declared.  “I’ll believe it when I see it” is my motto.  I think the Iranian treaty will fail, as I predicted it would months ago.  I predict Hillary Clinton will not be adversely impacted by all this E mail hysteria.  It would have happened by now if it were going to occur.  Mark Stein says that the Obama administration is “leaking material on Hillary to make her look bad to get her out of the race”.  This is poppycock.  One blog I read last Friday said that the stock market would strongly rebound today.  That didn’t happen either.  I think Joe Biden is just “tired’ and lacks the drive and the energy to run.  Despite what we hear about his family urging him on - - I don’t believe it.  I don’t believe they really want him to run.

This one black mother (I won’t say “muthah”) is good and pissed off about the amount of gang violence there is in Ferguson.  There was one black guy with a guy who got shot and killed by the police, meanwhile an innocent nine year old girl was killed by a stray bullet.  This mother couldn’t understand why the protestors were sympathizing with the thug and not the innocent victim.  No question about it.  ALL Black lives matter!  (Selah) But she tipped her hand a little talking about her own son that was in jail and she wasn’t going to have a thing to do with him in jail.  There would be no letters, no phone calls, no magazines, no nothing.  As such the woman seemed to be on a “crusade”.  But for the Republicans if they can find that agrees with them, they’ll shower her with all sorts of fame and accolades, with endorsements galore.  Some would compare people trying to get out of the ghetto to crabs pulling and tugging at each other trying to get out of the boiling pot but in the end only pulling each other back in.  But they're animals and don't know any better.  They know nothing of altruism not to mention logical thought.  What's our excuse?

There were twenty-one dollars in drug co pay expenses this month, which is sure a lot more than the seven it was last year.  In fact in total I've had $81.00 dollars in "expenses" which detracted from the free money I'd get to spend with this month.  For various reasons next month isn't "expected" to be as bad, but the overall trend is just plain - - Bad!  It’s almost two thirty and this is the twelfth day of no cigarettes of my own, with eight more to go.  This is Monday August 24, 2015 and we were limited to one cup of iced tea in the courtyard because of Lynn’s senior topics class.  I’ve had two whole cigarettes today.  The first was from Bill when I got up in the morning.  The second was a rollie from Ron just after lunch, and that one will cost me a quarter.

Here is more commentary on the stock market from yesterday:   As we’ve detailed repeatedly, our “markets” no longer resemble markets.  They are so distorted, both by central bank policy and technologically-driven cheating, that they no longer really qualify as legitimate markets.  Therefore we’ve taken to putting double quote marks around the word “”market”” often when we use it.  That’s how bad they’ve become.   Where normal markets are a place for legitimate price discovery, todays “”markets”” are a place where computers battle each other over scraps in the blink of an eye, ‘investors’ hinge their decisions based on what the Fed might or might not do next, and rationalizations are trotted out by the media for why inexplicable market price movements make sense.  Instead, we view the “”markets”” as increasingly the playgrounds of, by and for the gigantic market-controlling firms whose technology and market information have created one of the most lopsided playing fields in our lifetimes.  Signs of these distortions abound. One completely odd chart is this one, showing that the average trading range of the Dow (ytd) was the lowest in history as of last week (before this week’s market turmoil hit).  And that was despite Greece, China, QE, Japan, oil’s slump, Ukraine, Syria, Iran and all of the other ample market-disturbing news.