Interesting that several were stating that a slowing economy, and lowering inflation would be better for the economy or expense control over time. Now when it appears those will come true there is panic. Most employers have been saying it has been easier to find workers for sevreral months now, so lower new job growth was to be anticipated. How severe and how long a recession will be is the issue that to me is a concern. Mild recessions many times can reset the economy. However how big or little our econoomic setback will or could be is totally up to us as consumers as we are a consumer driven economy.

Bryce

Interesting that several were stating that a slowing economy, and lowering inflation would be better for the economy or expense control over time. Now when it appears those will come true there is panic. Most employers have been saying it has been easier to find workers for sevreral months now, so lower new job growth was to be anticipated. How severe and how long a recession will be is the issue that to me is a concern. Mild recessions many times can reset the economy. However how big or little our econoomic setback will or could be is totally up to us as consumers as we are a consumer driven economy.

Bryce

How y'all feel about Intel?

The consumers have about used up their credit cards

Including today, we have had some recent buying opportunities.

It sucks to watch the stock portfolio balance drop, but you can make something out it by putting cash back into the market.

With the M2 money supply dropping how do you guys expect the markets to keep rising?

It will take an injection of fiat currency to maintain that. If they do it hamburgers will be 30 bucks

The consumers have about used up their credit cards

Silver is on a downward spiral. I bought some today just to add another hard asset to my portfolio that I can touch. I'm pretty diversified. I got gold, timber, land, cash,cds and now silver. Stock market is a loser at this point!

The Fed isn't supposed to care that your stock investments are tanking

Here we go again, almost like clockwork. The minute the U.S. stock market falls out of bed, the chorus of Wall Street crybabies starts demanding that the U.S. Federal Reserve bail them out.

There are actually two groups of people clamoring for Fed Chair Jerome Powell to implement an "emergency" rate cut even before September's scheduled Fed meeting. One group consists of the permabulls, the people who are almost always bullish on the stock market, no matter how high it goes or how crazy the valuations. They always blame the Fed when the market goes down. It never fails.

I've been watching them do this for over 25 years. When the stock market goes up, they say they're geniuses and everyone else is a loser. When it goes down, it's all the fault of the Fed.

The second group? Liberals who want Powell to step in and juice the economy, which already looks to be on a knife's edge, ahead of the November presidential election. A market slump - let alone a possible recession - will surely not help Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

I'm hoping Powell ignores all of them completely.

For starters, none of this should be his concern.

The Federal Reserve already has a dual mandate: to maintain "maximum employment" and "price stability." It does not have an additional mandate to prop up the S&P 500 SPX, the Nasdaq Composite COMP, the Magnificent Seven group of tech stocks or any bubble Wall Street manages to cook up.

Nor does the Fed have a mandate to help the ruling party get re-elected.

And what, exactly, is this "emergency" that demands an emergency interest-rate cut, anyway? So far all we've seen is the stock market lose a couple of months' worth of gains. Did these people never study finance at their overpriced business schools? There's an "equity risk premium" because equities have risk.

If this is a massive crisis, what will these people call it when the stock market falls 50%? Presumably their heads will explode.

An emergency rate cut, as MarketWatch reporter Vivien Lou Chen points out today, could be counterproductive for the stock market. It could spook investors.

Emergency cuts are best left for actual emergencies - like 9/11 or the COVID-19 crisis.

Meanwhile, the interest rate I'm watching most closely isn't the short-term fed-funds rate - the one the Fed controls directly. It's the interest rate on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. Last week it was 6.9%. Today it's 6.3%.

But it still has a long way to go. For most of past decade, the 30-year mortgage was below 5%. For some of that time it was below 4%. During the pandemic it went as low as 2.5%. We probably won't see those rates again. But 5% or lower would be aces.

That would finally free up the housing market - which, as the National Bureau of Economic Research reminds us, has been frozen for the past few years by high rates.

Homeowners can't afford to move and give up their cheap loans. Prospective homeowners can't afford to buy. An all-around disaster.

The 30-year mortgage rate won't fall below 5% unless the interest rate on the 10-year U.S. Treasury BX:TMUBMUSD10Y keeps falling. That won't happen unless the bond market becomes absolutely convinced that Powell means what he's been saying for two years: that short-term rates will remain high for as long as it takes to make sure inflation isn't just tamed, but killed, buried and turned to dust.

And that won't happen if Powell gets panicked by the first stock-market rout.