Both the US and the UK have now taken downgrades to their sovereign debt, although the US is sloughing their own off because it came from a European agency.
The miners were hit much harder than bullion today, in keeping with the stock market weakness.
Four Simple Indicators for Precious Metals - Hussman
We might see a technical bounce around here in stocks, not something based on fundamentals. Stuffing the dysfunctional banks with money is not working, but the Fed and Washington seem incapable of taking effective new types of action.
Pawlenty's proposal of more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, while shifting more of the burden to the middle and lower classes, is probably the last gasp of a dying theory that still breathes life and does damage.
Neither stimulus nor tax cuts will work on an economy that is broken from years of public policy that favored job destruction and median wage stagnation. It is like putting gas into a car wrapped around a telephone pole.
And yet the US finds itself in a credibility trap, wherein the power brokers are complicit in national theft, and cannot stop themselves and each other from 'going in for the kill.' This is what I had forecast in 2005, and I think it is happening now.
And they may get it, the kill, one way or the other.
