The last chart shows that assets are having a very nice start. Silver is leading they way with stocks not far behind. Gold is still recovering from its end of year smash, which lasted into the first week in January. I suspect that if things hold together it will do well.
VIX is very low and complacency about the economic picture is the word for the day.
The nation would be doing great, with corporations earnings good and financial assets doing fine, if it were not for all these people with their problems like underemployment, unemployment, outrageous healthcare costs, unpayable student loans, lax enforcement against usury and fraud, inconvenient disabilities, limited opportunities, neglected veterans, natural disasters, and stagnant median incomes in the face of steadily rising costs and record inequality.
Benny and the financial engineers at the Fed must find this human element very annoying. After all, their specialists tell them that everything is fine. There must be something wrong with the people.
It reminds me of when I was a boy programmer, and the systems engineers would complain that they had finally gotten a big IBM mainframe operating at peak efficiency, with all the I/O and subsystems working fine. But if only they could keep the users off the system. They can be very disruptive and annoying.
Surely Ben and the Treasury, not to mention the Congress, must realize that the people are their customers, and the most important stakeholders without whom the system would look rather silly, and not Wall Street and the banks, and the upper crust of the financialized economy, right?
As Phil Gramm said in 2008, there are no real problems and no recession. Rather, the US is just 'a nation of whiners.' Well, maybe not everybody, just Mitt's infamous 47%.
