I hadn’t reviewed gold prices since early Monday morning. I was surprised to see gold up over $22 per ounce, but Andy wasn’t. Ben Bernank spoke today, and he confirmed the rumors that have been flying around. Yes, he’s still a money printer, and he has no intention of stopping. Hopefully, he will be stopped before the dollar turns into worthless bits and bytes on computers around the world, but there’s no indication that this is about to happen.
Andy and I also discussed how Apple has become the tail, wagging the stock market’s dog. As the most valuable company in the world, Apple can not only send computer suppliers and parts makers into an immediate frenzy, it can also do the same to stock markets. It has a disproportionate share of the NASDAQ’s valuation as well as the S&P’s. So it is truly the bellwether stock of our times. But that doesn’t mean the paper markets are at all healthy. The public has dropped them like a group of kids playing catch with a hand grenade. The averages are constantly being whipped around by high frequency trading and by the algorithm boys. So what is anything really worth these days, anyway?