Brief musings on the market

  1. The DJIA lost 3.57 percent today. Last Friday it lost 3.12 percent. This is nowhere near even the 20th worst day in the DJIA’s history—a 6.98 percent loss on September 29, 2008. But the past two trading days do represent the DJIA’s 19th and 20th worst daily point losses ever.
  2. Most economists think Greenspan’s Fed left interest rates too low for too long when rates hovered between one and two percent for 32 months between December 2001 and May 2004. But that’s nothing compared to today, which marks roughly 80 months of near-zero rates.
  3. Even if the U.S. stock market recovers somewhat in the next few weeks, problems in China have proven to be very fundamental and very serious. I take this as another good reason to believe my 8-month old prediction—that the Fed will not raise rates in 2015. China is in full-on stimulus mode, and sharp divergence between central banks’ policies makes conducting monetary policy in the U.S. difficult. If the Fed continues to flirt with the idea of a rate hike, it will be while China, Japan, and the Eurozone still meddle with stimulus. At the very least, this risks boosting the dollar’s value even further and weakening U.S. exports in the process. Larry Summers made this point in the Financial Times today. I explained it last fall.

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