Eurasian financial markets way down this morning. No bounce yet.
My assumption has been that the Secret Masters would try like tanj to keep the headline numbers propped up until the 2016 election, and that they'd have a fair amount of success. But you can only haul back on the stick for so long before you run out of airspeed, and once that happens you begin rapidly losing altitude.
Old assumption: if the Democrats were halfway smart, they'd throw the election, and blame the post-election crash on the Republicans.
New assumption: the Democrats will be frantically blaming the Republicans for the pre-election crash, despite the Administration's habit of completely ignoring the R-controlled legislature.
And: the crash will (as always) be blamed on free markets and the distressing lack of government intervention and regulation. Nothing short of full-on Fascism can protect us from trade cycles amplified by central-bank policy!
(Fun suggestion: if you want to stimulate the economy without amplifying market distortions, there's always the helicopter-drop approach. Except that when Chimpy tried that one, it was foiled by debt; Joe Sixpack, instead of spending his $600 on a shiny new big-screen TV, sensibly and responsibly used it to pay down his credit-card balance. The easy-debt regime creates problems on so many levels....)
Update: Mid-morning, there's a bit of a bounce, or at least the market indices are only down about 1%-ish at the moment. Amalgamated Fuzz is actually up substantially, after starting way down... but it was down all last week, and is far below its early-spring peak.
Update 2: Half an hour past closing, Yahoo Finance and Google Finance can't agree on the closing price of Amalgamated Fuzz. Yahoo shows $26.25 at closing, $26.54 after hours; Google shows $26.50 at closing.
Meanwhile, all the indices are down between 3% and 8.5%. Is it time to start another war yet?
(I should really be getting some work done, but what with one thing and another I've been running on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and my brain won't focus. All I've managed to accomplish today is to establish that the half-ziggurat waveform my portable oscilloscope was showing me yesterday wasn't real (I moved the gadget under test to the lab and used the real scope, and it shows the expected square-wave burst), but now I can't remember why I was looking at that signal in the first place.)
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