Come on negative Nancy, look at this way we have lived through at least 3 recessions, the sun came up this morning and We are still breathing lol, 😂.
Have a great day 🤗
Yes, hopefully we all are still breathing – but remember, there was a recession where the investors fell from the sky like rain, but without rain’s grace and charm.
For what it’s worth, the market recovered its losses and perhaps more yesterday, with the DJIA up 3.3% – and it was the laggard of the big three. The market supposedly reacted positively to unexpectedly good employment numbers, an unemployment rate which ticked up a tenth of a point, and some remarks from Fed Reserve chairman Jerome Powell which seemed to indicate the Fed won’t be the vampire that swoops in and sucks the nation dry.
Ahem.
I can remember when good employment numbers caused the market to sink, because the expectation would be that wages would go up due to competition for workers in a shrinking availability pool, thus lowering corporate profits, so I’m uncertain how much weight to give to the employment numbers assertion of yesterday. Perhaps no weight should be given to it. Perhaps investors have figured out that, in order to spend, people must first have at least a prospect of higher wages in front of them. But it’s worth reading Kevin Drum’s recent furious rant about the phantom of rising wages:
If you want to look at wage growth, you have to adjust for inflation. Period. There are only a very few specialized instances where you want to look at nominal wages, and those are unlikely to come up in ordinary conversation. So for the last time, here is real wage growth for blue-collar workers over the past five years:
To the extent that official inflation numbers are an effective proxy for however price inflation impacts you – and, remember, there were NO SMARTPHONES (you in the back row, stop twitching!) back in 1966, so how do you integrate them into inflation numbers? – blue collar workers have made no progress.
Outside of possibly owning smartphones, flat screen hi-res TVs, improved vehicles, etc.
Baaaaaack to the topic, so what’s driving the market? I’d put $10 – but no more – into the pool that says this is all about algorithms. Look, it’s hard to write computer algorithms that are working in what may be positive feedback loops, and I’m talking individual feedback loops; I’m not even sure how an individual algorithm would deal with a cumulative feedback loop. Can it be written, or trained, to recognize such a beast and either GET OUT NOW or TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LESSER ALGORITHMS? ‘cuz that’s what they’re all about, those algorithms. Try to catch the other algorithms unaware.
It’s damn silly and I still haven’t seen a good argument to even permit their use.
Be careful out there on the trading floor. We pruned off a couple of stocks to get us out of the fossil fuel industry, something we should have done years ago, but I’m a slug. Otherwise, we’re planning to hold tight. We thought we had some dry powder, but unexpected medical expenses may shoot the chance to take advantage of a potential Trump Recession. But so long as we don’t panic and sell, we should be ok.
