Over the past several months, we have witnessed one of the greatest stock market rallies in American history. The S&P 500 has gone
70 days in a row without a 1 percent loss, and most weeks we have seen one daily surge after another. If stock prices were exploding because the underlying U.S. economy was performing extremely well, we would have reason to celebrate. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. In fact, last week I shared
12 signs that the economy is actually slowing down substantially. Instead, this stock market "melt up" is being largely fueled by reckless intervention by the Federal Reserve. The Fed's balance sheet has been ballooning once again, and investors know that stock prices tend to go up significantly when that is happening. So right now Wall Street is in the midst of a raucous party, and everything will be wonderful as long as stock prices continue to move in the right direction.
Unfortunately, no stock market rally lasts forever, and a day of reckoning is coming. At this point, stock prices have become so absurd that
even the New York Times is saying that we should "worry" about what is ahead.
We also witnessed dramatic stock market "melt ups" prior to the stock market crash of 1929, prior to the bursting of the dotcom bubble, and prior to the financial crisis of 2008.
Comment: Free speech as anglophones conceive it hasn't existed in France throughout the post-WW2 era (there are, for example, laws against questioning the Holocaust or related aspects of WW2). Nevertheless, there has certainly been less and less of it in recent years.
Back in 2012, the French state began systematically prosecuting France's most famous comedian (Dieudonné) and one of its top intellectuals (Alain Soral) for pointing out the inordinate influence of the Israeli lobby. At this point, they have, between them, racked up dozens of years in imprisonment and millions of euros in fines - although the prison terms have been deferred, for now.
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