I wanted to thank you, I had already been moving positions in to short bonds. You kind of gave me the final push to get flat and day-multiple day
Fed meeting this week. Looking for a .25 basis point hike. Who know what the fed says but I'm sure they will be extremely dovish! Looking for a 5% volatility up or down into end of week.
Last time the Fed raised by .50 points looks like it was May 16, 2000. 22 years ago Since then it has always been +0.25 whenever they decided to raise.
0.50% of nothing is next to nothing. The Fed is way behind the curve, they must consider our economy the worst in human history to make cash=trash. Historic interest rates Mesopotamia, c. 3000 BC: 20% Babylon, Code of Hammurabi, 1772 BC: codified earlier Sumerian custom of 20%. Persian conquest (King Cyrus takes Babylon), 539 BC: rates of 40+%. Greece, Temple at Delos, c. 500 BC: 10% Rome, Twelve Tables, 443 BC: 8.33% Athens/Rome: circa the first two Punic Wars, 300-200 BC: 8% Rome: 1 AD: 4% Rome, under Diocletian, 300 AD: 15% (estimated) Byzantine Empire, under Constantine, 325 AD: limit 12.5% Byzantine Empire, Code of Justinian, 528 AD: limit 8% Italian cities, c. 1150: 20% Venice, 1430s: 20% Venice, (Leonardo da Vinci paints "The Last Supper in Milan"), 1490s: 6.25% Holland, beginning of the Eighty Years' War, 1570s: 8.13% England, 1700s: 9.92% US, West Florida annexed by the US, 1810s: 7.64% US, Reagan administration, 1980s: 15.84% Fed Funds
I remember it well. What a blunder by Greenspan that was. The Fed began tightening in the June meeting the year prior and it was the sixth consecutive rate hike. Tech stocks had crashed by the fifth 0.25% rate hike. There were calls for the Fed to ease up on the tightening. The 0.5% rate hike at the May meeting was a shocker and the final nail in the coffin for stocks in the dot com era. I will add that inflation was under control, unemployment was not notable, and the economy was chugging along. In fact, the rationale given for the hikes was that the economy was doing too well!
Looks like the Nasadaq Composite, Nasdaq 100 and Russell 2000 are back down >20% from ATHs, the Bear is back
I remember Cramer back in the 1998-2001 days when he ran thestreet.com and he was pumping Iomega among other graveyard tech stocks. It didn't end well for Iomega shareholders. I believe there is a Nova episode (PBS) in the early 2000s about the dot com imposion and Cramer was interviewed in it and he said that Iomega was only a trade and you were meant to exit before the crash.