were designed to enrich the 1% and screw the 99% out of retirement. I caught on to that scheme at the time!

The current market paradigm (all time high stock prices while workers get fucked) is bolt-for-bolt the same pattern that prevailed in autumn of 1929, big-bank recommendations and all.

This is a time to SELL stocks, not buy them!

To all those people whose economic life is being destroyed by the Fed, acting for Congress, thank you for your service. (/s)

If you don't pay your rent then your landlord cannot pay her bills, etc. Mortgages go unpaid, car loans go unpaid, municipal taxes go unpaid. More people are laid off as municipal revenues decrease. Student loans go unpaid, credit cards go unpaid. investment vehicles based on these cash streams fail. Purchases of goods and services stop, especially durable goods. Who will buy a new car now, or start a home improvement project? How can you plan for anything? Finally the real estate market will completely collapse. It's a chain reaction.

The biggest mistake is that the government is not protecting the incomes of the workers. You need to support the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. The top will come crashing down when the bottom collapses. The thunder of the US economy shattering will be heard around the world.

None of the major Western powers are ready to open up. The current level of active infections is at its peak. Those infected are emitting massive numbers of Covid-19 viruses. The result will be that the numbers of new infections will start to climb again. The economies will have to go into lockdown, again. Only this time there will be no fantasy that it will be a quick recovery. For every two weeks of being open it will take 6 weeks just to get back to where they were. It's no accident that the US and the UK have the worst numbers. Neither are capable of functioning as a cohesive nation.

an investment manager for J.P. Morgan told me that Morgan built up stocks, then sold them high. This crashed them, they then rebought them when they bottomed out. To explain: They had stocks worth $80. they inflated them to $100. They sold at $100, crashing the stocks to $50. They then rebought at $50. Rinse and repeat. (They can do this because they have enough money to single handedly move the value) Now the Fed gives them the money to buy the stocks they've crashed, insuring that they will reinflate regardless of reality. Supposedly there is no possibility that the stock market will crash and stay crashed because the Fed will just print however much it takes to prop it up. This is what happened in 2008, this is what is happening now. (my retirement savings is with Chase, and that is exactly what is happening for me - I'm actually up on the year) Don't take my story as advice, but it seems to be accurate.

On the second day of the lock down in West Hollywood, California, I was standing in line outside a grocery store when I saw the first example of resistance to the restrictions. Seven weeks letter, the total number of rebellious gestures has reached a grand total of three. One lady called for "an uprising" as she was leaving a supermarket as she saw that the waiting line had grown to about 40 hapless souls. And two days ago, a guy took his mask off as he got out of a store and shouted to everybody in line, "See? You don't really need this thing!"

That first act of defiance on March 21 was different. That store is in West Hollywood, a famously gay neighborhood, but also home to a lot of entertainment industry functionaries – like my wife and me. As I took my place in line this morning, a very attractive couple fell in line behind me. The lady looked to be in her 50s, extremely attractive, wearing all black. The guy sounded like Alan Alda and he was annoyed at having to stand in line. Based on his usual life experience as a Hollywood Sharp Guy, he went to the front of the line to step ahead of the schlubs. The store employee would not have any of it, and Alan Alda came back to join his female companion at the back of the line.

“This is crazy,” he said to the world at large. He went on to poke logical holes in the prevailing narrative such as the obvious fact that we were all less than six feet apart in the line. And in an act of defiance reminiscent of Sally Field as Norma Rae, the guy announced to his line mates, “Look, I am going to kiss my girlfriend.”

I turned away but heard her sotto voce effort to shut him up, and then she let him kiss her.

He then resumed his bitching about the bizarre living arrangement that he cannot buy his way out of. Eventually, he took a breath and repeated, “This is crazy.”

I then looked him in the eye and said, “You think?”

One of the few things I enjoy about my life in Hollywood is getting to razz guys like that. They are so smug and they think they are so smart, but almost all of them are thick as a brick. I thoroughly enjoyed the perplexed look on his face as he tried to decipher irony.

I was thinking about doing some organizing with the dude. Lech Walesa organized the city of Gdansk while riding around on city buses. He was the cranky little guy who lots of people got to know. When the shipyard workers were on a wildcat strike, the cranky little guy took the lead and started the Fall of the Soviet Union. These lines at the grocery stores will be our only face to face interaction with our fellow citizens for the next weeks, months or years. It is a little early for bread line oratory, but his guy had clearly invited discussion.

But then he went on with his own stupid monologue – “Look, in three months everything will be back to normal, and the stock market will come back. Huh, thank God!”

That guy is not ready for The Revolution. You can see how The Markets are his window to the universe. Since the Dow has rallied and regained about half of what was lost during the original collapse, I am sure that dude is sagely stroking his chin, smirking at all us dumb asses who do not understand the mysteries of Success in America. He is definitely somebody in tune with the folks at the Federal Reserve. So long as the Market is good, life is good.

We will all find out the old fashioned way how the market deals with a 40% reduction in business activity -- we will live through it.