"The boy who cried wolf" with markets

Maybe everyone would be in a better mood to handle the stock market uncertainty (plunge) if we had just gotten a blast of warm temperatures first. Have you ever been this impatient about getting a sense of warmth in the air? 

March was absolutely good for nothing. No redeeming value, just gloom. Illness made the rounds too. I still have a somewhat scratchy throat. A temperature of around 70 would be a godsend, restore my normal vigor and ability to feel upbeat about things. 

Oh my goodness we are being challenged to feel upbeat in a general sense. As of 9 a.m. the situation with U.S. stocks looked terrible yet again. The tariffs and trade war do appear to be looming for all of us. Republicans are saying that any pain will be temporary. 

The problem with a stock plunge is that it can be like the boy who cried wolf. I asserted this in a comment to a Yahoo! News article early this morning. For so many years we have experienced a pretty quick turnaround anytime things look bad on Wall Street. So many big-name economists have seen their standing tumble by trying to predict a "crash" or something close. 

So what happens? If you follow the financial news, you know that a quick turnaround to the up side happens when someone close to "the Fed" even hints there will be an interest rate cut at the next meeting! But hey, how many times can we go to the well with this? In my young years, hardly anyone paid attention to the Federal Reserve. It was about the most boring topic you could imagine. Did the Fed even hold press conferences back then? 

Today the world awaits as if God is about to speak, when the Fed chair begins a formal statement or takes questions from the media. I have to laugh at the scramble by so many people to "translate" what the Fed chair says. Everything rests on interest rates, it seems. A magical elixir, sort of. So my question is, can this continue indefinitely? 

We have a big new factor in the equation now: the tariffs and trade war. Trump wants his followers to follow along, obviously. Just watch our congressperson Michelle Fischbach. Do you think Ms. Fischbach would ever deviate from anything that DJT says or wants? So I expect she'd tell everyone to be patient and have confidence that we'll all come out winners in the end. 

Maybe you remember when we heard about "bargain hunters" coming into the market so often after a dip. Watch CNBC much? This was in their script for a long time. Has it sort of disappeared now? Maybe because of sounding cliche-ish, cheap? The bargain hunters would move into the market after a down day to turn things around. Well, you cannot resist a "bargain," right? 

But my God, the market has gone upward so easily for so long. My late parents grew up in the Great Depression. All this must have seemed like the Twilight Zone to them. My late friend Howard Moser talked about how the Depression-era people "never threw anything away." And then the digital age comes along where we have to buy new generations of the tech stuff all the time. Discard the old stuff, buy new. How would you even describe this to the Depression-era people? 

We now sail along feeling quite sure that no matter how far the stock market indexes dip at any time, well surely the situation will right itself and it will probably happen within a day or two. 

But what if it doesn't? What if one of these days a true long-term calamity sets in? DJT has a long reputation of destroying everything that he touches. Going bankrupt with a casino? But he sold himself as this great businessperson. He surely got a head start within his family. Everyone disregards that. 

Now with Easter approaching, all the Stevens County hardcore Christians will have their faith in DJT re-affirmed because that is what it's all about for them now. I'll be happy to step aside for Easter. I'll skip the images of Jesus Christ all bloody and suffering. You can have that. 

I can accept the concept of Christ "dying for our sins." As a kid that's how it was presented to me. The most violent it got was to see the image of Christ up on the cross and certainly that was no picnic. But today? Are you all sadists or what? 

Yes, Christ "died for our sins. So that we may have eternal life." 

I embrace that. But I doubt today that Jesus Christ would approve of Donald Trump.

 

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com