WASHINGTON. Wall Street seems to have sobered up a bit in Thursday morning trading action. After three days of bullish fun that largely reversed last week’s nasty slide in both averages and individual stocks, this morning’s news – including negatives for Boeing and Facebook – gave investors a pause. Meanwhile, operating in background, a widespread university admissions cheating scandal, almost solely carried on by wealthy elitist Democrat supporters, cast even more doubt about whether the America we know and love has become the America we knew and loved.
Bad News Bears color Thursday morning blue
Moving back to stocks and bonds once again, here’s the tale of the current tape. Excerpt via CNBC, which elaborated on the currently sour, quizzical market mood in an online Thursday morning piece.
“New home sales fell 6.9 percent in January — which was more than expected and a sign the U.S. government shutdown could have kept buyers on the sidelines.
“Sentiment was also dampened after Bloomberg News reported China and the U.S. are trying to push back a meeting between the countries’ two leaders from late March to April at the earliest. This comes after Trump said he was in no rush to form an agreement. Bloomberg’s report comes after China’s industrial output expanded at its slowest rate in 17 years.
“Investors expected the two leaders to meet at Mar-a-Lago later this month as both sides claimed progress was being made on trade negotiations.”
Yep, China again. Trade negotiations will continue to cause problems for 2019 market action until they don’t.
Boeing and Facebook lay a pair of eggs
In addition to that news, let’s add Boeing’s (trading symbol: BA) continuing efforts to solve and reverse a battering in its shares. In case you’ve been asleep, Boeing’s current problems are primarily due to the crash-related woes now grounding its 737-MAX airliners worldwide. Also causing Maalox Moments for traders and investors today: the influential shares of large-cap social networking giant Facebook (FB) have dropped a whopping 2 percent today. That’s due to the continuing outages the social networking giant and its subsidiaries have been sustaining since Wednesday, notes CNBC.
“Facebook shares were among the big decliners… after a worldwide outage of its core app, Instagram and WhatsApp. The social media company’s stock was also under pressure after The New York Times reported federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals the company made with other tech giants.”
When big hitters like Boeing and Facebook collapse on the morning tape with a resounding slap, their very size tends to take the averages down with them. When it rains, it pours. Or something like that.
Today’s action looks like negative to flatline city
On the other hand, things could be worse. The major averages still hovered almost exactly at flatline as of 11:35 a.m. ET, with the Dow up a measly 0.02 percent. The tech-heavy NASDAQ and the broad-based S&P 500, however, were down about the same percentage. As always, one never knows which way stocks will turn by today’s 4 p.m. ET close. But that’s where we are right now as we approach the noon hour.
NEWS FLASH: The market closed at 4 p.m. as usual Thursday, and the final numbers were pretty close to what we saw at 11:35 a.m. in the morning, making this pretty much of a nothingburger trading day. We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.
Elsewhere in the news, here’s a developing story that’s downright depressing
Playing in background today we uncovered news of the spectacular payola-style admissions scandal recently uncovered at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Targets of this Wall Street Journal exposé include Yale, Stanford, and, alas, my own alma mater, Georgetown University. As a longtime resident institution of The Swamp on the Potomac, I don’t find it surprising that this formerly Catholic and now far-left bastion of fashionably socialistic politics now claims its space in the current elitist Hall of Shame. A heartbreaking development.
ZeroHedge has some choice comments on this developing scandal, which, sadly, offers little actual shock value in 2019.
“By now you have probably heard that dozens of people have been arrested for participating in a multi-million dollar college admissions scam. Enormous amounts of money were paid out in order to ensure that children from very wealthy families were able to get into top schools such as Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California. And as The Economic Collapse blog’s Michael Snyder writes, we should certainly be disgusted by these revelations, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Such corruption happens every single day on every single level of society in America. At this point our nation is so far gone that it is shocking when you run into someone that actually still has some integrity.”
An elitist scandal as outrageous as it is sad
The American public is already aware that if they’re not either members of or pals with members of America’s elite, they can go pound sand. They can’t buy the same kind of privilege that super rich people can buy. As in bribing (with big bucks) university athletic coaches and other individuals to accept and/or help create fake “accomplishments” and even fake, photoshopped IDs. This cadre of wealthy liberals ginned up these and more to help their C-average high school sons and daughters gain admission to elite universities where these lazy little twerps just don’t belong.
Yes, these wealthy moms and dads included in a fake admissions application package that greased the skids to get the kids into these fancy institutions of “higher learning.” With the help of insiders at those universities, no less.
Unfortunately, having later been admitted under false pretenses, the higher learning these kids end up taking away after their costly four-year college careers (assuming they’re actually capable of graduating) will mostly be what they learned by cheating to get in. Namely, that money talks. Great lesson for America’s “future leaders.”
Psst! Pretty much all the moms and dads involved in this elitist scandal support Democrats
Of course, they’ll all graduate as wealthy “socialists” as well. Just like their cheating parents, pretty much all of whom, as The Examiner unsurprisingly notes, are all heavy donors to the Democrat Party. That comes as no surprise to us, as it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who’ve actually been the real “party of the rich” at least since the days of the Vietnam War, fake news to the contrary.
We’ve been telling folks about this cold, hard fact for a couple of decades now, but the news has yet to register. The lesson is, when these clowns tell you about all the bad things conservatives are going to do to you, rest assured that these wealthy leftists have already done what they’re bitching about, but the press has covered it up for them.
We admit that this current admissions scandal – which we’ll cover in detail in another article when we’ve finished our research – has little to do, directly, with the stock market per se. But for us, at least, this story administers yet another blow to public trust and confidence in practically all institutions these days. It proves that corruption, quite clearly, is not merely confined to Washington, D.C. and its lobbyist- and lawyer-corrupted suburbs. Everybody who can strives to join in on this game.
The slippery slope of anarchy is visible on the horizon
If increasing numbers of Americans start routinely ignoring standard policies and on-the-books laws over a long period of time, the “rule of law” starts to break down. With disastrous consequences. We see this every day now, and not just in college admissions.
As a nation, we now find ourselves in a very bad place. We must logically conclude that you and I will never get ahead in this world. Unless we start lying and cheating, too. Just like our “betters.” After all, if it works for them, it works for us, right?
Wrong answer. At least from a moral perspective. Assuming you’re not an elite or at least affiliated with one. But today, America’s wealthy, and oh, so liberal Democrats and fake socialists lecture us on our value and our worth while proscribing what we can do, say and earn. So it’s not hard to understand why America – and the American stock market today – finds itself utterly confused and descending into moral and legal decay. Why should we serve as the “suckers” when all the privileged liberal rich people laugh all the way to the bank? And the college admissions office as well.
— Headline image: Fauxcahontas cartoon by Branco, reproduced here with permission and by arrangement with Legal Insurrecdtion.
