The market’s last chaotic day closed in a way that befit the entire year. Up, down, up harder, down harder, and done!
It looked like the violence of the day may have come from the Plunge Protection Team attempting to push the market up in the middle of the afternoon, except that the middle of the afternoon doesn’t fit the PPT’s MO because the birthing-sized push didn’t come in the PPT’s usual obvious final-hour press. So, what was the push in the penultimate hours all about?
Was it everything the PPT could do to press the market up, and the press finally collapsed? Did the PPT try and fail? After a staggering rise (literally, as in up and down and up), the market plummeted in the final hour from a roughly 225-point positive position on the Dow down to close at about -75, leaving us with indisputably the worst December in market history by several measures or, as I called it, the December to Remember.
Or maybe the PPT was content to just hold the market approximately where it got to yesterday in order to keep the bulls from coming back to life in their irrational exuberance while keeping the market from an all-out crash.
All nothing better than wild guesses because few there be who really know if the PPT was even engaged at all, so clandestine are their actions. They are like the mafia that doesn’t exist as a single organization and that does most of its work underground. The PPT is not an organization but a number of entities tapped (originally) to counsel markets upward and (more recently) just to buy directly and push them upward. The PPT exists by the decree of President Ronald Reagan, who didn’t believe markets should ever be allowed to crash.
Do not mistakenly think the modestly large rises and falls in todays action by whomever were not major just because the market closed a little under flat. The factor that was historically significant (again with the historic records!) was much bigger than the overall rises and falls indicate, and that could be because the PPT hit massive resistance trading the other way today.
Read the rest here: The Great Recession