30,000 Friday – Dow Holding the Line so Far

Dow 30,000 – amazing! 

Well, maybe not that amazing as we were at 28,872 in January so, on the whole, we're up 1,200 points (4%) for the year but, considering what has happened to us since January – that's pretty remarkable.  Of course we did drop to 19,000 (down 36.66%) in March but back up over 50% since then has more than made up for it – pretty exactly made up for it, in fact – as if someone were trying to paint a picture.  

Pictures are subjective, of course – and so is belief.  As Linus has taught us, if one person believes in the Great Pumpkin, no matter how convincing his story is, people tend to think he is crazy.  But, if millions of people believe in Santa Clause – we have a national holiday!

At the moment, millions of people believe in the stock market and let's all hope that illusion isn't shattered too harshly.  On the whole, we only have 4% more faith in 30,000 than we had in January and, unlike the Great Pumpkin, 30,000 did finally show up – though also unlike the Great Pumpking, 30,000 appeared because the market had A LOT of help – about $20Tn Globally, in fact. 

For $20Tn, I'm pretty sure I could make Santa Clause real too!  Let's see, there are about 2.2Bn children (under 18) so that's about $10,000 per child we've borrowed and spent bailing out the Global Economy so yes, I'm pretty sure we could have spent that money to put a bike or a doll under their trees instead – even including delivery charges (or we could use Prime and get it for free!) though having someone dress up in a red suit and devour cookies would make it a bit more expensive – but I think we'd still have a bit of change left from our $20Tn shopping spree.

THAT is how much money we've spent propping up the markets this year.  In the US, in fact, we spent $6Tn and we have 74M children so that's $81,000 per child – Merry Christmas indeed!  According to the GOP, we can't afford to feed these children and we can't afford to educate these children or provide them with child care, but we will spend whatever it takes to arrest and detain them, right?  

Boy are our values screwed up or what?

What will happen to our beloved Markets when the stimulus is removed?  Will the market look like this little girl and have to go begging on the side of the street for some inflows?  That's what happened to the market in 2008 and Hell – that's what happened to the market in March!  How quickly we forget, right?  We have a vaccine and, hopefully, by Summer things will begin getting back to normal but keep in mind that vaccinating people doesn't make them immune – it only trains their bodies to fight the disease so all those vaccinated people can still become infected and can still be carriers – yet they are going to be more likely to be careless in their behavior creating a lot more danger for the unvaccinated.  

The only way to eradicate the virus is a combination of vaccines and continued precautions until we have successfully vaccinated more than 75% of the population and that's then assuming that Covid-19 doesn't constantly mutate like the flu virus, which slips past the vaccines on a regular, annual basis.  Fortunately, we're changing our leadership and hopefully we can start taking sensible steps to addressing this problem but, clearly, no steps are going to be taken prior to January 20th and another 3,000 Americans died yesterday and 10,000 people will die over the weekend, which is far more than every single person you are likely to see in a week unless you go to a stadium – all dead.  

Have a great weekend, 

– Phil

All dead, all dead

All the dreams we had

And I wonder why I still live on

All dead, all dead

And alone I'm spared

My sweeter half instead

All dead

And gone

All dead… – Queen