Thrilling Adventures

When I started this blog I had in mind to recreate the type of everyday journal that tracks some key drifting variables. To see bonds improve, commodities to falter, equities to retreat – whatever – and to mark those dynamics as I’d map the pace of competing thoroughbreds. Yes, I’d seen things run in lockstep down, which is where we seem to be now again.

The seeds of wrath were in the making, as this blog sometimes has reported. But things were held together somehow. Now the straw that stirred the drink (the drink consisted of optimism and greed) has failed. The market has fallen in incredible lunges, and the rug has been pulled underneath the hopeful and horny suitor in the parlor.

Trump and futures markets bid the Fed to cut again the following Monday. It did. But the magic failed to conjure the rabbit. The awareness that suddenly dawned on the market and maybe the president, that the Fed now has little room should things worsen.

Last week’s crash ended the bull market. There is no global policy summit in store this time, as Barron’s Randall Forsyth points out. A recession seems logical, and it is being priced-in by the market. Still, a geopolitical dogfight between Russia and Saudia Arabia is in full form, and a possible side casualty is the fledgingly rebirthing American oil (read: Shale) industry. “The pro’s advise against excessive inaction,”writes Baron’s Al Root. But buy orders are dried up.

What beckons is – at best – a lost year. Some of us have seen the lost year before. You know all those estimates about copper production or IT spending for a given five-year sequence? I recall the 2000 bubble’s residue was one full year of revenue gone from that five year slate, and much of the IT and IT media’s best and brightest becoming nomads searching for work. No straw stirs the drink forever, and there's no such thing as a Perpetual Motion Machine.

And, who would be surprised if Wall St wasnt bailed out, its coffers like sails filled, but its retail customers’ prospects -- along with those of the Main St folks of "Peoria" -- left sinking? 

                                                                                            - Baruch Bernard.

For the Week of March 9, 2020 –

DJIA -10.36% to 29,185  (on the following Monday it will fall fully another 10%)

Gold-10% to $1515 (isn’t it supposed to go up in the dynamic? Was it used to meet margin calls?)

Related
https://www.barrons.com/articles/coming-up-short-in-response-to-the-virus-crisis-11584144198
https://www.barrons.com/articles/what-to-do-now-that-weve-had-a-market-panic-51584145123
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/upshot/coronavirus-economy-crisis-demand-shock.html?