Is the Fed Fix in for the election?

As we near Halloween, the US stock market looks like it’s whistling past the graveyard near the end of a year that I predicted would be the dawn of “the Epocalypse.” (By that, I meant an economic apocalypse, the likes of which we’ve never seen.)

So far, however, that prediction has not manifested. In fact, the market’s fibrillating heartbeat in this graph exhibits a preternatural and eery calm. But it is too calm — too calm to be natural. The stock market plunged on my predicted schedule at the start of the year in what turned into the worst January in the US stock market’s history. Then, suddenly, it was resurrected, great death defied; but, after a rapid recovery it lost consciousness and now behaves more like the walking dead.

I have never seen a more rigged looking stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has been flatlining in the narrowest range possible for almost four months. Coincidence, or has the Fed clandestinely set a threshold below which it will not let the market fall, just like it does openly for inflation — in order to make sure that nothing happens economically that would push voters toward Donald Trump?

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