Click here to download the PDF: The Quarterly Q4 2023
“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.” – Satoshi Nakimoto, the presumed pseudonymous person, or persons who developed Bitcoin, and created bitcoin’s original reference implementation.
So that’s why the stock market was up…
One of my favorite websites is https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/ which is sort of a one-stop shop for American federal financial data. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Services (BFS) created Fiscal Data to consolidate federal financial data into one easy-to-use website. “Old School” investors can still download data manually, one file at a time, from the Treasury Department and the BFS, but these days, it’s just way easier to click up the fiscal data website. Easy, but evidently not that heavily visited by investors. You see most investors seem to be under the impression that stocks roared higher in the last leg of 2023 primarily because of the widely held view that the US Federal Reserve will begin cutting interest rates in 2024 thanks to reductions in inflationary expectations. We completely understand the rate cutting ruckus, but we believe it has created some commotion in the stock market that, for the time being, has led to a “melt up”.
Who doesn’t like a good rally in stocks?
But then who among that group knows what to do when the inevitable sell-off happens?
We completely understand the obsession many investors have with Jerome Powell and the US Federal Reserve. We have written about The Fed in the pages many, many times before. But if you look at how much money the Biden Administration spent last year, in conjunction with the way the Silicon Valley Bank situation was handled, there really was no way stocks particularly big ones weren’t set up to do well this year. In short, liquidity was plenty.
