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We peruse the Wall
Street Journal’s stock-market round-up each day not to find out why
stocks may have risen or fallen, but to determine what factors are
conventionally thought to have caused such price movements to occur.
This is an important concern for forecasters, since, even if one attempts to
get a read on the market using purely technical means, it still helps to
understand what is on the diseased brains of the coprolagniacs whose
job it is to manipulate shares to the certain benefit each day of Goldman
Sachs, J.P. Morgan and other officially sanctioned predators of the
securities world. The very difficult task of explaining the stock
market’s behavior to readers of the Journal falls most often to
columnist Peter McKay, and we don’t envy him his job. Because he
works for one the most important and prestigious financial publications in
the world, it simply won’t do for him to say, as we might (and often
do), that stocks rose or fell the previous day for no good reason at all
– or at least, for no reason remotely related to reality. We think
celestial factors play a far bigger role in this than mainstream pundits will
ever be permitted to acknowledge, and that a gypsy fortune teller is
therefore better equipped than the highest-paid analyst on Wall Street to
tell us why the broad averages are likely to go either up or down.
So why did shares
dive in the final hour of yesterday’s session after screwing the pooch
for most of the day? McKay cited two reasons: fears related to Europe’s
credit crisis, and to the tighter rules soon to be imposed on Wall Street.
With all due respect to McKay, this simply won’t wash. As we all
know, investors fear nothing so much as the unknown, and what could be more
knowable than the economic fate of Europe?
Does anyone really believe that Greece
will not eventually go down, taking Portugal,
Spain, Italy
and Ireland
with it? Of course not. And that means the markets have already discounted
the actual event -- or at least tried to discount it, notwithstanding a
global monetary blowout that has put trillions of dollars worth of reckless
purchasing power in the hands of the aforementioned coprolagniacs.
They will be at
it again today, of course, and if it happens that stocks rise for two or
three days, or perhaps even for the remainder of the week, it will be written
in the weekend round-ups that traders seem to have put fears of
Europe’s collapse behind them. In fact, although they should be scared
senseless about what lies in store not only for Europe
but for the global economy, it is the ceaseless shifting of the sun, the moon
and the stars that will continue to shade, and sometimes badly miscolor,
their perceptions of the financial cataclysm now bearing down on all of us
with irresistible force.
Rick Ackerman
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Rick Ackerman is
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