MARKET COMMENT
Dave Fry at ETF Digest, February 18, 2009
Not very impressed? That seems to be the way investors felt today. An early rally fizzled while volume was on the light side while breadth was negative.
There may be a sense and fear developing from rumors and chatter of bank nationalizations that would wipe-out shareholder equity and hurt bondholders. That seemed the message from financials today.
That’s it for today. I don’t think there are many people telephoning their brokers wanting to buy stocks. Many investors are looking for help and the old industry maxims (stay the course; stick with the plan; buy the dip; average down and etc) are becoming tiresome.
The Obama mortgage plan was greeted with a shrug. In the after hour trading HP announced disappointing earnings and markets continued to sell-off.
It may indeed take a government takeover of banks to start the repair work. I don’t know about the auto industry but the government should be very cautious about throwing another $30 billion to GM.
I don’t know what spark it will take to get markets moving higher again other than a temporary oversold bounce.
I got some hate mail yesterday regarding my comments that the government is too big. I stand by that statement and pose these questions. Just how many Department of Agriculture’s do we need? We have the one really really big one (have you seen the size of that building!) in DC with lots of regional and state offices. Then, of course, we have 50 different State Agriculture departments as well. This is a depression era holdover agency and I really don’t know what they do. I know they control the FDA which is supposed to monitor food safety. But it’s been written that they turned most food inspections to the states. Of course we have a peanut somenella scare to show for that.
Is education better since we now have a Department of Education matched by 50 different state agencies?
Do we have more energy because we have an Energy Department now?
These questions answer themselves objectively I would think.
Anyway, it’s not my mission to go off the rails into politics but it’s just one of those annoyances. Besides, I’ve got this PC and blog and I can state my opinions. Holy cow!
Let’s see what happens.
Disclaimer: Among other issues the ETF Digest maintains positions in: IEF, PST, TLT, TBT, FXE, DRR, GLD, DGP, DBP, and GDX.
