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Looking Beyond The Smokescreen

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We bloggers have the mainstream news outlets to thank for our readership.  The inane, single-minded focus on a particular story, simply because it brings a huge audience to one’s competitors, regularly provides the driving force behind programming decisions made by those news producers.  As a result, America’s more discerning, critical thinkers have turned to internet-based news sources (and blogs) to familiarize themselves with the more important stories of these turbulent times.

Robert Oak, at The Economic Populist website, recently expressed his outrage concerning the fact that a certain over-publicized murder trial has eclipsed coverage of more important matters:

For over a week we’ve heard nothing else by the press but Casey Anthony.  Imagine what would happen if Nancy Grace used her never ending tape loop rants of hatred against tot mom to spew and prattle about the U.S. economy? Instead of some bizarre post traumatic public stress disorder, stuck in a rut, obsessive thought mantra, repeating ad nauseum, she’s guilty, we might hear our politicians are selling this nation down the river.

*   *   *

Folks, don’t you think the economy is just a little more important and actually impacts your lives than one crime and trial?  The reality is any story which really impacts the daily lives of working America is not covered or spun to fiction.

The fact that “our politicians are selling this nation down the river” has not been overlooked by Brett Arends at MarketWatch.  He recently wrote a great essay entitled, “The Next, Worse Financial Crisis”, wherein he discussed ten reasons “why we are doomed to repeat 2008”.  Of the ten reasons, my favorite was number 7, “The ancient regime is in the saddle”:

I have to laugh whenever I hear Republicans ranting that Barack Obama is a “liberal” or a “socialist” or a communist.  Are you kidding me?  Obama is Bush 44.  He’s a bit more like the old man than the younger one.  But look at who’s still running the economy: Bernanke. Geithner. Summers. Goldman Sachs. J.P. Morgan Chase. We’ve had the same establishment in charge since at least 1987, when Paul Volcker stood down as Fed chairman.  Change?  What “change”?  (And even the little we had was too much for Wall Street, which bought itself a new, more compliant Congress in 2010.)

As the 2012 campaign season begins, one need not look too far to find criticism of President Obama. Nevertheless, as Brett Arends explained, most of that criticism is a re-hash of the same, tired talking points we have been hearing since Obama took office.  We are only now beginning to hear a broader chorus of pushback from commentators who see Obama as the President I have often described as the “Dissapointer-In-Chief”.  Marshall Auerback wasn’t so restrained in his recent appraisal of Obama’s maladroit response to our economic crisis, choosing instead to ratify a well-deserved putdown, which most commentators felt obligated to denounce:

It may not have been the most felicitous choice of phrase, but Mark Halperin’s characterization of Barack Obama was not far off the mark, even if he did get suspended for it.  The President is a dick, at least as far as his understanding of basic economics goes.  Obama’s perverse fixation with deficit reduction uber alles takes him to areas where even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan dared not to venture.  Medicare and Social Security are now on the table.  In fact entitlements of all kinds (excluding the myriad of subsidies still present to Wall Street) are all deemed fair game.

To what end?  Deficit control and deficit reduction, despite the fact that at present, the US has massive excess capacity including millions of unemployed and underemployed, a negative contribution from net exports, and a stagnant private spending growth horizon.  Yet the President marches on, oblivious to the harm his policies would introduce to an already bleeding economy, using the tired analogy between a household and a sovereign government to support his tired arguments.  It may have been impolitic, but “dick” is what immediately sprang to mind as one listened incredulously to the President’s press conference, which went from the sublime to the ridiculous.

*   *   *

Let’s state it again:  households do not have the power to levy taxes, to issue the currency we use, and to demand that those taxes are paid in the currency it issues.  Rather, households are users of the currency issued by the sovereign government.  Here the same distinction applies to private businesses, which are also users of the currency.  There’s a big difference, as all us on this blog have repeatedly stressed:  Users of a currency do face an external constraint in a way that a sovereign issuer of its currency does not.

*   *   *

The President has the causation here totally backward.  A growing economy, characterized by rising employment, rising incomes and rising capacity utilization causes the deficit to shrink, not the other way around.  Rising prosperity means rising tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, whereas there is an overwhelming body of evidence to support the opposite – cutting budget deficits when there is slack private spending growth and external deficits will erode growth and destroy net jobs.

The increasing, widespread awareness of Obama’s mishandling of the economic crisis has resulted in a great cover story for New York Magazine by Frank Rich, entitled, “Obama’s Original Sin”.  While discussing Rich’s article, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism lamented the fact that Obama is – again – the beneficiary of undeserved restraint:

Even Rich’s solid piece treats Obama more kindly that he should be.  He depicts the President as too easily won over by “the best and the brightest” in the guise of folks like Robert Rubin and his protégé Timothy Geithner.

We think this characterization is far too charitable.  Obama had a window in time in which he could have acted, decisively, to rein the financial services in, and he and his aides chose to let it pass and throw their lot in with the banksters.  That fatal decision has severely constrained their freedom of action, as we explain .  .  .

Miscreants such as Casey Anthony serve as convenient decoys for public anger.  Hopefully, by Election Day, the voters will realize that Casey Anthony isn’t to blame for the pathetic state of America’s economy and they will vote accordingly.


 

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Widespread Disappointment With Financial Reform

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Exactly one year ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Financial Reform Bill Exposed As Hoax” wherein I expressed my outrage that the financial reform effort had become a charade.  The final product resulting from all of the grandstanding and backroom deals – the Dodd–Frank bill – had become nothing more than a hoax on the American public.  My essay included the reactions of five commentators, who were similarly dismayed.  I concluded the posting with this remark:

The bill that is supposed to save us from another financial crisis does nothing to accomplish that objective.  Once this 2,000-page farce is signed into law, watch for the reactions.  It will be interesting to sort out the clear-thinkers from the Kool-Aid drinkers.

During the year since that posting, I felt a bit less misanthropic each time someone spoke out, wrote an article or made a presentation demonstrating that our government’s “financial reform” effort was nothing more than political theater.  Last July, Rich Miller of Bloomberg News reported that according to a Bloomberg National Poll, almost eighty percent of those surveyed expressed “just a little or no confidence” that the financial reform bill would make their financial assets more secure.  Forty-seven percent believed that the bill would do more to protect the financial industry than consumers.  The American public is not as dumb as most people claim!

This past week brought us three great perspectives on the worthlessness of our government’s financial reform facade.  I was surprised that the most impressive presentation came from a Fed-head!   Thomas M. Hoenig, President and CEO of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, gave a speech at New York University’s Stern School of Business, concerning the future of “systemically important financial institutions” or “SIFIs” and the Dodd-Frank Act.  (Bill Black prefers to call them “systemically dangerous institutions” or “SDIs”.)   After a great discussion of the threat these entities pose to our financial system and the moral hazard resulting from the taxpayer-financed “safety net”, which allows creditors of the SIFIs to avoid accountability for risks taken, Tom Hoenig focused on Dodd-Frank:

Following this financial crisis, Congress and the administration turned to the work of repair and reform.  Once again, the American public got the standard remedies – more and increasingly complex regulation and supervision.  The Dodd-Frank reforms have all been introduced before, but financial markets skirted them.  Supervisory authority existed, but it was used lightly because of political pressure and the misperceptions that free markets, with generous public support, could self-regulate.

Dodd-Frank adds new layers of these same tools, but it fails to employ one remedy used in the past to assure a more stable financial system – simplification of our financial structure through Glass-Steagall-type boundaries.  To this end, there are two principles that should guide our efforts to restore such boundaries.  First, institutions that have access to the safety net should be restricted to certain core activities that the safety net was intended to protect – making loans and taking deposits – and related activities consistent with the presence of the safety net.

Second, the shadow banking system should be reformed in its use of money market funds and short-term repurchase agreements – the repo market.  This step will better assure that the safety net is not ultimately called upon to bail them out in crisis.

Another engaging perspective on financial reform efforts came from Phil Angelides, who served as chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which conducted televised hearings concerning the causes of the financial crisis and issued its final report in January.  On June 27, Angelides wrote an article for The Washington Post wherein he discussed what caused the financial crisis, the current efforts to “revise the historical narrative” of what led to the economic catastrophe, as well as the efforts to undermine, subvert and repeal the meager reforms Dodd-Frank authorized.  Angelides didn’t pull any punches when he upbraided Congressional Republicans for conduct which the Democrats have been too timid (or complicit) to criticize:

If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $10 trillion annually since the financial collapse.  You disregard the reality that two-thirds of the deficit increase is directly attributable to the economic downturn and bipartisan fiscal measures adopted to bolster the economy.  Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

*   *   *

If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses that savaged communities across the country and pledge to block the appointment of anyone to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless its authority is weakened.  You ignore the evidence of pervasive excess that wrecked our financial markets and attempt to cut funding for the regulators charged with curbing it.  Across the board, you refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.

David Sirota wrote a great essay for Salon entitled, “America’s unique hatred of finance reform”.  Sirota illustrated how bipartisan efforts to undermine financial reform are turning America into – what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart called – “Sweden’s Mexico”:

On one hand, Europe’s politics of finance seem to be gradually moving in the direction of Sweden — that is, in the direction of growth and stability.  As the Washington Post reports, that Scandinavian country — the very kind American Tea Party types write off with “socialist” epithets — has the kind of economy the U.S. can now “only dream of:  growing rapidly, creating jobs and gaining a competitive edge (as) the banks are lending, the housing market booming (and) the budget is balanced.”  It has accomplished this in part by seriously regulating its banking sector after it collapsed in the 1990s.

*   *   *

After passing an embarrassingly weak financial “reform” bill that primarily cemented the status quo, the U.S. government is now delaying even the most minimal new rules that were included in the legislation.  At the same time, Senate Republicans are touting their plans to defund any new financial regulatory agencies; the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has declared that “Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks” — not the other way around; and the Obama administration is now trying to force potential economic partners to accept financial deregulation as a consequence of bilateral trade deals.

Meanwhile, the presidential campaign already looks like a contest between two factions of the same financial elite — a dynamic that threatens to make the 2012 extravaganza a contest to see which party can more aggressively suck up to the banks.

Any qualified, Independent political candidate, who is willing to step up for the American middle class and set out a plan of action to fight the financial industry as well as its lobbyists, would be well-positioned for a 2012 election victory.


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Inviting More Trouble

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I frequently revert to my unending criticism of President Obama for “punting” on the 2009 economic stimulus program.  The most recent example was my June 13 posting, wherein I noted how Stephanie Kelton provided us with an interesting reminiscence of that fateful time during the first month of Obama’s Presidency, in a piece she published on William Black’s New Economic Perspectives website:

Some of us saw this coming.  For example, Jamie Galbraith and Robert Reich warned, on a panel I organized in January 2009, that the stimulus package needed to be at least $1.3 trillion in order to create the conditions for a sustainable recovery.  Anything shy of that, they worried, would fail to sufficiently improve the economy, making Keynesian economics the subject of ridicule and scorn.

As it turned out – that is exactly what happened.  Obama’s lack of leadership and his apologetic, half-assed use of government power to fight the recession has brought us to where we are today.  It may also bring Barack Obama and his family to a new address in January of 2013.

At this point, the “austerian” economists are claiming that the attenuated stimulus program’s failure to bring us more robust economic growth is “proof” that Keynesian economics “doesn’t work”.  The fact that many of these economists speak the way they do as a result of conflicts of interest – arising from the fact that they are on the payrolls of private firms with vested interests in maintaining the status quo – is lost on the vast majority of Americans.  Unfortunately, President Obama is not concerned with rebutting the arguments of these “hired guns”.  A recent poll by Bloomberg News revealed that the American public has successfully been fooled into believing that austerity measures could somehow revive our economy:

As the public grasps for solutions, the Republican Party is breaking through in the message war on the budget and economy.  A majority of Americans say job growth would best be revived with prescriptions favored by the party:  cuts in government spending and taxes, the Bloomberg Poll shows.  Even 40 percent of Democrats share that view.

*   *   *

Though Americans rate unemployment and the economy as a greater concern than the deficit and government spending, the issues are now closely connected.  Sixty-five percent of respondents say they believe the size of the federal deficit is “a major reason” the jobless rate hasn’t dropped significantly.

*   *   *

Republican criticism of the federal budget growth has gained traction with the public.  Fifty-five percent of poll respondents say cuts in spending and taxes would be more likely to bring down unemployment than would maintaining or increasing government spending, as Obama did in his 2009 stimulus package.

The voters are finally buying the corporatist propaganda that unemployment will recede if the government would just leave businesses alone. Forget about any government “hiring programs” – we actually need to fire more government employees!  With those annoying regulators off their backs, corporations would be free to hire again and bring us all to Ayn Rand heaven.  You are supposed to believe that anyone who disagrees with this or contends that government can play a role in job creation is a socialist.

Nevertheless, prominent individuals from the world of business and finance are making an effort to debunk these myths.  Bond guru Bill Gross of PIMCO recently addressed the subject:

Solutions from policymakers on the right or left, however, seem focused almost exclusively on rectifying or reducing our budget deficit as a panacea. While Democrats favor tax increases and mild adjustments to entitlements, Republicans pound the table for trillions of dollars of spending cuts and an axing of Obamacare.  Both, however, somewhat mystifyingly, believe that balancing the budget will magically produce 20 million jobs over the next 10 years.  President Obama’s long-term budget makes just such a claim and Republican alternatives go many steps further.  Former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota might be the Republicans’ extreme example, but his claim of 5% real growth based on tax cuts and entitlement reductions comes out of left field or perhaps the field of dreams.  The United States has not had a sustained period of 5% real growth for nearly 60 years.

Both parties, in fact, are moving to anti-Keynesian policy orientations, which deny additional stimulus and make rather awkward and unsubstantiated claims that if you balance the budget, “they will come.”  It is envisioned that corporations or investors will somehow overnight be attracted to the revived competitiveness of the U.S. labor market:  Politicians feel that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth.

*   *   *

Additionally and immediately, however, government must take a leading role in job creation.  Conservative or even liberal agendas that cede responsibility for job creation to the private sector over the next few years are simply dazed or perhaps crazed.  The private sector is the source of long-term job creation but in the short term, no rational observer can believe that global or even small businesses will invest here when the labor over there is so much cheaper.  That is why trillions of dollars of corporate cash rest impotently on balance sheets awaiting global – non-U.S. – investment opportunities.  Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today’s marketplace.

*   *   *

In the near term, then, we should not rely solely on job or corporate-directed payroll tax credits because corporations may not take enough of that bait, and they’re sitting pretty as it is.  Government must step up to the plate, as it should have in early 2009.

Hedge fund manager, Barry Ritholtz discussed his own ideas for “Jump Starting the U.S. Economy” on his website, The Big Picture.  He concluded the piece by lamenting the fact that the federal debt/deficit debate is sucking all the air out of the room at the very time when people should be discussing job creation:

The focus on Deficits today is absurd, forcing us towards another 1938-type recession.  The time to reduce the government’s economic deficit and footprint is during a robust expansion, not during (or just after) major contractions.

During the de-leveraging following a credit crisis is the worst possible time to be deficit obsessed.

Don’t count on President Obama to say anything remotely similar to what you just read.  You would be expecting too much.


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Wealth Redistribution

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One of the sleaziest, most disingenuous arguments exploited by politicians is the “wealth redistribution” theme.  Whenever an influential corporate sponsor of some creepy politician is confronted with proposed legislation, which might change the status quo by reducing unconscionable profiteering, we are told that the new bill is a “socialist” attempt at “wealth redistribution”.  Unfortunately, there are too many sheeple who don’t realize that “wealth redistribution” already happened.

The recent uprisings in the Middle East have demonstrated how difficult it can be to maintain a plutocracy in the modern world.  As the American voting public becomes more familiar with the economic circumstances which led to the Egyptian turmoil, attention gradually gets refocused on how our domestic situation compares with Mubarak’s dystopia.  Blogger “George Washington” (a former law school professor) of Washington’s Blog recently wrote a piece concerning how the “Gini coefficient” demonstrates that America’s upward wealth redistribution has reduced this nation to banana republic status:

Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemeni protesters all say that inequality is one of the main reasons they’re protesting.

However, the U.S. actually has much greater inequality than in any of those countries.

Specifically, the “Gini Coefficient” – the figure economists use to measure inequality – is higher in the U.S.

*   *   *

Gini Coefficients are like golf – the lower the score, the better (i.e. the more equality).

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the U.S. is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world, with a Gini Coefficient of 45.

In contrast:

  • Tunisia is ranked the 62nd most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of 40.
  • Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal, with a Gini Coefficient of 37.7.
  • And Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of around 34.4.

And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years, since the Gini Coefficient was last calculated, so it is undoubtedly currently much higher.

So why are Egyptians rioting, while the Americans are complacent?

Well, Americans – until recently – have been some of the wealthiest people in the world, with most having plenty of comforts (and/or entertainment) and more than enough to eat.

But another reason is that – as Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School demonstrate – Americans consistently underestimate the amount of inequality in our nation.

Ariely and Norton’s paper, based on their 2005 poll of 5,522 citizens about their preferences for wealth division, has been the subject of much commentary.  Last fall, Bruce Watson wrote an article for Daily Finance discussing Ariely and Norton’s report.  As Watson explained, the following empirical data compiled by Professor Edward Wolff, (and incorporated into the Ariely-Norton paper) portrayed the “real world” wealth distribution in America:

Currently, 85% of America’s wealth, which is defined as total assets minus total liabilities, is held by the country’s richest 20%.  Meanwhile the upper middle class holds 11%, the middle class has 4%, and the lower class and poor share an anemic 0.3%.

Here’s how Watson summarized the results of the Ariely-Norton research:

In the poll, the vast majority of Americans across the political, gender and wealth spectrum displayed a markedly skewed understanding of how America’s money is divided.  On average, respondents thought that the rich hold only 58% of the nation’s wealth, 32% less than their actual holdings.  They thought that the middle class controls 13% of the country’s wealth, more than three times their actual holdings.  As for the bottom 40% of the population, the assumption was that the lower class and poor own a measly 9% of the country’s wealth.  In reality, these two groups control about one thirtieth of that amount.

Who Should Get the Money?

Although the perception that America’s wealth distribution is unfair cut across partisan lines, Republicans and Democrats disagreed about the ideal distribution.  People who voted for George Bush believed that the richest 20% of the population deserved roughly 35% of the nation’s wealth.  Kerry voters radically disagreed:  they felt that the rich deserved only about 30%. When it came to the country’s poorest citizens, Bush voters felt that they deserved about 9% of the country’s assets; Kerry voters preferred to give them 12%.

Respondents making over $100,000 per year, the group most heavily skewed toward a top-heavy distribution of wealth, advocated a system in which the top 20% received about 40% of the country’s assets and the bottom 20% got roughly 7%.  Yet even this comparatively Dickensian wealth distribution still gave America’s rich less than half of their current holdings, while giving the poorest more than twenty times their current holdings.

In October of 2008, before the full extent of the Wall Street megabank bailouts had been completely understood by most Americans (and before those multi-million-dollar bonuses had been awarded to the malefactors who caused the financial crisis) the Gallup Organization conducted a poll on the subject of wealth redistribution.  This is what they observed:

A majority of Americans (58%) say money and wealth should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people, although slightly less than half (46%) go so far as to say that the government should redistribute wealth by “heavy taxes on the rich.”

*   *   *

Still, in each of the four times Gallup has asked this question in recent years, between 45% and 51% of Americans have gone so far as to agree with the fairly harsh-sounding policy of “redistribut[ing] wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”

Because the polls discussed above reveal that the current wealth distribution is unacceptable to most Americans, the “wealth redistribution” argument — as it is often used by politicians – should be a non-starter.  Perhaps a program of  “enhanced tax incentives for generosity” might enjoy more widespread acceptance than Gallup’s “heavy taxes on the rich” – to the point where an overwhelming majority of Americans would support it.

Unfortunately, unless that “overwhelming majority of Americans” has an army of lobbyists to advance such an initiative, the cash registers politicians portraying the effort as “socialism” will be the only voices that matter.


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The Home Stretch

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October 27, 2008

We are entering the final week of the longest Presidential campaign in our nation’s history.  At the same time, the world economy continues to flirt with chaos and our nation’s equities market indices are diving at a faster pace than Superman’s swooping down from the sky to save Lois Lane from a potential rapist.  Some stockbrokers believe that an abrupt and decisive nosedive in the markets might have a cathartic effect and finally bring us to the long-awaited “bottom”, from which there would be only one place to go:  up.  Rock musician Tom Petty wrote a song about the death of his mother, called: Free Fallin’.  That song has recently become the theme for America’s stock markets.  The situation has become so bad that many fear it may be necessary for the feds to suspend equities trading until all of the nervous investors and frenzied hedge fund managers have a chance to gather their wits.  Would the government really intervene and close the stock markets for a day or more?

There is one authority who earned quite a bit of “street cred” when our current economic crisis hit the fan.  He is Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University.  He earned the nickname “Doctor Doom” when he spoke before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on September 7, 2006 and described, in precise detail, exactly what would bring the financial world to its knees, two years later.  As reported by Ben Sills and Emma Ross-Thomas in the October 24 edition of Bloomberg:

Roubini said yesterday that policy makers may need to shut down financial markets for a week or two as investors dump assets. Trading in futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was limited today after declines of more than 6 percent.

This week brings us more earnings reports and new housing starts that could send already skittish investors (as well as terrified hedge fund managers) on a “panic selling” binge.  Could this trigger a market shutdown by the government as predicted by Dr. Roubini?  If so, we may find the markets closed for the final days before the Presidential election.  The Republicans and their media trumpet, Fox News, would likely seize upon such a development, characterizing it as validation of their claim that the investing public fears a “socialist” Obama Presidency.  In reality, there would be no way to measure the impact of the election results on the equities markets under such circumstances.  If the markets were kept closed until after the election, there would be quite a number of investors, chomping at the bit to dump their portfolios during the hiatus, ready to do so as soon as the markets re-opened.  On the other hand, Stuart Schweitzer, global market strategist at JP Morgan Private Bank appeared on the October 24 broadcast of the PBS program, Nightly Business Report, and explained what to really expect about the impact of the Presidential election on the securities markets.  Schweitzer believes that regardless of who is elected, once we get past Election Day, there will be a sense of certainty established as to who will be making economic policy going forward into the new Presidential term.  This fact in itself, regardless of what that economic policy might become, will eliminate the element of uncertainty that breeds some degree of the fear in the hearts of investors.

If the stock markets really end up being closed during the final days before the election, we would likely see more havoc than calming.  The timing would prove too irresistible for conspiracy theorists to ignore.  Some would see it as a plot by the Republicans to conceal how bad the economy really is.  Others might see it as a ploy by “Washington elites” (a term used by some in reference to Obama supporters) to conceal widespread fear of putting a “communist” in charge of our nation.  The smartest course from here would be for the Federal Reserve Board’s FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) to undertake a responsible, public relations role when it meets on Tuesday.  They should be ready to explain to the public what has really been happening in the markets:  an unregulated species of investments called “hedge funds” has been causing mayhem on the trading floors.  Many (if not most) of these hedge funds are going broke and they are attempting to secure a place in the line for Federal bailout money.  They have caused equities trading to function more like eBay:  the only market movement that matters over the course of any given day is what takes place during the final three minutes before the closing bell, when the hedge fund managers dump stocks.  On eBay, the winning bid for an item is usually made during the minute before an auction ends.  Unlike eBay, the stock market numbers can go up or down.  These days, the index movement prior to the closing bell is usually seismic (in one direction or the other).   It was never like this before.  These trading patterns often trigger pre-established “stop loss orders” to sell stocks, usually established by individual investors upon purchase of those stocks.  The result is an avalanche of “sell” orders at the end of the day.  The FOMC needs to explain this disease to the public and let us know the Fed is working on a cure.  Closing the markets in the final days before a Presidential election will not be a cure.  Such a move will just create a scab that will quickly be picked away by an investing public that needs to ease up on the caffeine and go out for a walk.