Remember This Milestone: The Dow Jones Industrial Average Hits 22,000 For The First Time In U.S. History
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
August 2nd, 2017
The Dow hit the 22,000 mark for the first time ever on Wednesday, and investors all over the world greatly celebrated. And without a doubt this is an exceedingly important moment, because I think that this is a milestone that we will be remembering for a very long time. So far this year the Dow is up over 11 percent, and it has now tripled in value since hitting a low in March 2009. It has been quite a ride, and if you would have told me a couple of years ago that the Dow would be hitting 22,000 in August 2017 I probably would have laughed at you. The central bankers have been able to keep this ridiculous stock market bubble going for longer than most experts dreamed possible, and for that they should be congratulated. But of course the long-term outlook for our financial markets has not changed one bit.
Every other stock market bubble of this magnitude in our history has ended with a crash, and this current bubble is going to suffer the same fate.
But many in the mainstream media are still encouraging people to jump into the market at this late hour. For example, the following comes from a USA Today article that was published on Wednesday…
“It’s still not too late to get in,” says Jeff Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, based in San Francisco. “The gains are firmly rooted in business fundamentals, not false hopes.”
I honestly don’t know how anyone could say such a thing with a straight face. We have essentially been in a “no growth economy” for the past decade, and signs of a new economic slowdown are all around us.
But even though price/earnings ratios and price/sales ratios are at some of the highest levels in history, some analysts insist that the stock market still has more room to go up…
On the flip side, investors with time to ride out any short-term market storm should not rule out getting in the market now. Economies around the globe are improving and are boosting the profitability of corporations in the U.S. and abroad, says Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Cornerstone Financial Partners in Charlotte, N.C.
Zaccarelli won’t even rule out Dow 25,000 by the end of 2018.
Personally, I believe that it is far more likely that we would see Dow 15,000 by the end of 2018, but over the past couple of years the bulls have been right over and over again.
But the only reason why the bulls have been right is because of unprecedented intervention by global central banks.
Today, the Swiss National Bank owns more than a billion dollars worth of stock in each of the following companies: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Facebook.
So where does a central bank like the Swiss National Bank get the money to purchase all of these equities?
It’s easy – they just print the money out of thin air. As Robert Wenzel has noted, they simply “print the francs, exchange them for dollars and make the purchases”.
The Rest…HERE
