Per Rasmussen, some surprising polling data:
One week after President Obama’s speech to Congress, opposition to his health care reform plan has reached a new high of 55%. The latest Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll shows that just 42% now support the plan, matching the low first reached in August.
A week ago, 44% supported the proposal and 53% were opposed.
Also surprising, Treasury bonds reversed intraday to move upwards in price, down in yield; the % moves in TLT (proxy for the long bond), TNX (the 10-year's yield), gold and the S&P 500 are essentially identical as I write, all moving about 1%.
Now that virtually all bears are hibernating, some remain uncowed. Information about a proprietary sentiment service passed on to me by one of the remaining bears, Paul Lamont of Lamont Trading Advisors, suggests that investors/speculators have digested the green shoots of recovery and then some.
It takes courage to be a full-fledged out-of-the-stock market bear when so many have at least partly capitulated, some saying not to fight the tape.
The take here remains in sympathy with Mr. Lamont's views. It would appear that this recent cycle is being driven as the last one was, with liberal doses of credit and unremitting financial speculation. The stock indices are only now perhaps surpassing their 2001-2 lows when adjusted for inflation. In this context, it is no surprise that gold continues to trudge along, up as much as the S&P 500 on the year (counting dividends) but with less volatility, but outperforming it on 1-year and longer time frames.
Given that the Government and the Fed are transferring unbelievable amounts of either borrowed or newly-printed money into the financial markets (and some directly into the real economy), it is no surprise that matters look better in the markets.
A credible skeptic of the big financial companies with an impressive track record of predicting many blow-ups over the past two years is Reggie Middleton at boombustblog.com. Suffice it to say that he feels that prices for the stocks of the largest complex financial companies and many smaller banking companies are in looney-tunes territory, and that the financial crisis is far from over.
One thing about the markets: even Yogi Berra's famous saying isn't quite correct. The markets are never over.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009
Hello DoctoRx,
ReplyDeleteRespecting the so-called health care question, Paul Roberts, as he does so frequently, has an analysis that penetrates right to the core of things. Here he was at CounterPunch a couple of days ago:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09142009.html
To consider this question from the standpoint of partisan loyalties - which is how it is seen at the moment by all but the most sensate of comentators - is a mind numbing waste of time. Simply to speak in those terms and not of the system as an irremediably corrupt and hopelessly impotent shell is to foster the very myth on which the people are choking today: That we are in the United States a functioning democracy. Get over that one and we've got a chance.
Lavrenti Beria
Roberts is an incisive commentator. I was surprised that he didn't also allude to the bennies for Big Pharma that Team O got right to.
ReplyDelete