I love Business Development in any industry and any product or service …it’s actually extremely strategic and w/ a well focused and actionable set of benchmarks or criteria can usually guarantee success. This AM I have been working on a proposal for a company to make a major LOB move into a new arena. After spending some brains cells and finger strength typing I took a break for lunch …
While eating my cold spaghetti (I never heat up the next day spaghetti) there in front of me was the following news (breaking OBTW):
I remember studying socioeconomic indicators during the CMT and also remember the same type of “announcement” in 2007. So, I went to the authority for everything – Wikipedia – and found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
Pretty interesting, to say the least … some say it’s true, some say it’s not. I don’t know u’all but I do find it pretty fun to conjecture …
Everyone thought the market was pretty sinister when we found support at 666 on the cash SPX. And, now, well don’t you know that Freedom Plaza is 1776 feet tall, 1776 was a pretty important date in the US History and, the cash S&P closed w/ in one point at 1775. OK, give me slippage and just touch 1776 to make it official – but close enough for government work?
now, come on and work w/ me wouldn’t that be a hoot if 1775 (1776) was the all time high?
so we get the BREAKING NEWS of the tallest skyscaper and then in the WSJ we have the following: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579183680751473884
Take time to read the article … here’s some quotes for digestion:
- The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.
- In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.
- Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.
- Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.
- As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy.
tick tick tick tick – http://www.ranker.com/list/seinfeld_s-greatest-george-steinbrenner-moments/the-doctor – OMG everyone under the desk …
Bart
PS – Mr. Huszar, you are forgiven. Quick question, can you give me a hint of when they are going to stop intervening? Would help the case for a short or do we not have free flowing markets anymore? Just curious …
