Aside from the market talk and very real view that declining confidence in centrally planned policy is key to coming market events, this post is for fun. Jeez, lighten up.  I know some readers just adore centralized policy making and interest rate manipulation, but the Fed has proven already that it does more harm than good.  The “Great Recession” doesn’t happen without the policy excesses that fomented it. 

Going on 7 years into an economic recovery/expansion, blaming global sources while seeing deceleration in domestic manufacturing, exports and now, payrolls after not normalizing by even a crappy 1/4 point?  Yeh, that’s just peachy.  I am all for being bullish if that is what is on tap.  Bad policy does not mean stock market bearish on any given time frame.  But it seems that Fed apologists have very constricted time frames by which they frame their views.  There is a thing called a big picture and it is littered with negative symptoms of centrally planned economies, both in the US and world-wide.

I am not advocating a Luddite-like return to bartering or even the gold standard.  I am simply saying that constant policy intervention is a sign that something is not right.  This is a global situation, but speaking of the US, which is my home, this chart says all it needs to say.  A large distortion has been bred into the market by abnormal policy.  This could prove very bearish or hyper bullish.  We just don’t know yet.  It’s all just prices and asset appreciation, after all.

Almost as entertaining as the market’s reaction to the event itself is today’s reaction to what a bunch of clowns pretending to be in control of the economy had to say about the economy and by extension their policy supposedly governing same.

Market participants, black boxes and substance abusers alike might want to keep a couple of things in mind; 1) inflammatory news events are fleeting in their effects (and look at how quickly the gold sector, one standing to gain from a weak economic backdrop and its implications for policy, head faked up and reversed down) and 2) after the FOMC Minutes release in September the market cheered and zoomed higher after the Fed punted.  It then immediately reversed into a downside leg that became the bottom re-test.