* It really was a brutal week on Wall Street, led by the tech-heavy NASDAQ, which is down about 5-1/2% on the week; 3% of that alone came today, now down about 17% from its high

* Not officially in a bear market yet, but getting there

* The vast majority of NASDAQ stocks are in bear markets, in fact, many of those stocks are down 40 or 50% or more - a number of those stocks down 40 or 50% today alone

* The Russell 2000 is already in a bear market; it's down 24%

* Dow Transports also down 25%, and transports were actually up this week

* The S&P and the Dow are only down about 12% - in correction but not quite a bear market, but remember, all bear markets begin as corrections, and I think this is just the early stage of a bear market

* You can contrast that with what's going on with gold; gold was up 5% on the week.  It added $18 today alone to close above 1170, in fact the price of gold has risen by $120/ounce since the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in December

* The dollar also had a bad week, despite rising somewhat today on the jobs numbers, the dollar index had its worst weekly decline since 2009

* So now, the opposite of what everybody expected has happened

* Everybody thought the stock market would go up, because the rate hike was proof that the economy was stronger; instead the stock market has tanked, in fact the beginning of January was Wall Street's  worst start to the year in history

* In contrast, the expectation was that rising interest rates would help the dollar; instead the dollar has actually declined

* Higher interest rates were expected to be bearish for gold; instead it was the catalyst for a huge rally in the price of gold

* The weaker than expected jobs report was assumed to be the reason for today's stock market carnage, because we only created 151,000 non-farm payroll jobs and the Street was looking for 188,000 jobs

* The reality is not that the report was weak, it is that it was not weak enough

* The only thing that could have saved this market would have been a horrible jobs report - a jobs report so bad that an interest rate hike would be clearly off the table

* Instead, this jobs report could indicate that the Fed is more likely to raise rates as a result of the numbers

* That is why the market went down

* No one wants to admit that the only thing holding up this market is the Fed, so they pretend that the market is disappointed by the weakness of the report

* Jobs have nothing to do with it - this market has always been about one thing - the Fed and cheap money

* Now it hangs on weather the Fed will raise rates again

* I believe the next thing the Fed is going to do is to cut interest rates

* I think they might even go negative and they going to launch QE4

* The markets have not figured this out yet

* Even the Atlanta Fed, whose first estimate of Q1 GDP at just 1.2% (I think this is an over-estimation; I think the Q4 .7% will be downwardly revised) saw this apparently strong jobs report they increased their Q1 GDP estimate by a full percentage point to 2.2%

* If the Atlanta Fed thought the jobs report was so strong, why are the reporters assigning blame to the jobs report for the sell-off

* If you look beneath the headline number of the miss, on the number of non-farm payrolls, you'll find out what the markets were so worried about:

* 1) The official unemployment rate moved down to 4.9% - that's the first time we've had a 4 handle on the unemployment rate since Obama has been President

* In fact, he did not waste much time calling a press conference proclaiming the success of his administration and declaring that the U.S. economy is the strongest in the world; quite ironic because I thin we are already in recession



Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy