The paid for opinion pundits are touting a new bull market on the Bloomberg today.
Is this a bottom? Well perhaps, but until we see some positive change in the economic indicators that are not paper exercises in thinly veiled accounting fraud we choose to remain in cash and precious metals, while trading the ins and outs on a daily basis, trying to stay out of the way of the antics of the Wall Street wisenheimers.
So far this feels like a distribution rally before a retest of the lows. It is the timing of things that is the challenge, and the ability to spot a genuine change in character in the long market trend.
This is probably not the place for any investors to enter the markets, since the risk is still so historically high, although a little lower by recent standards.
Time will tell. The Fed fooled us in 2004 with their willingness to intentionally create a housing bubble to avoid the near term consequences. Perhaps Treasury and the Fed will cast caution to the wind and do it again, setting us up for a larger, more destructive collapse on the next group's watch.
But the character of this 'bull market' strikes us as the same as that of those who are our financial and political leaders: shallow, false, short-sighted, manipulated by dark forces, self-serving, a pleasant appearance over an underlying rot, and a in sum a terrible disappointment and lapse of the discovery and disclosure of things as they are.
“Thus, it should be understood that when pro-US figures use the term, 'rules-based international order,' they are not referring to anything analogous to the rule of law. Quite the opposite, they are using Orwellian language to describe a system in which essentially no rules can be established and/or observed, given that the dominant state has the prerogative to violate and/or rewrite “rules” at its whim.” Aaron Good, American Exception