Stocks Start Year With Biggest Drop in 84 Years – Ep. 128

* The U.S. stock market opened the first trading day of 2016 with a bang, but not the type of bang the bulls were hoping for
* The Dow was down 276 points-it was down as much as 450 points in the last hour of trading
* In fact,we opened down 300 and change and we hung around the down 350 - 400, in fact down 276, at the close was about the best level of the day
* The NASDAQ closed down around 104
* The Dow Jones transports continues to get crushed - the weakest index on the day, down 156 points
* We're now down more than 20% from last year's high, officially in bear market territory in the Dow Jones transportation - and don't blame this on weak oil prices because transports benefit from weak oil prices
* This is all about weakness in the economy
* A lot of the carnage was blamed on China because China was down 7% overnight, the worst first day of the year in the history of Chinese stocks
* Supposedly the catalyst was a weaker than expected PMI in China - I don't believe for a second that the market was down 7% based on that report
* First, there were two PMI's released, and one was slightly better than estimates and the one that was slightly below came in at 48.2 vs. expectation of 49
* I think the Chinese market would have gone down regardless of the PMI numbers
* The irony of it is that our own recently-released Chicago PMI on New Year's Eve and our number was way worse than the Chinese number
* We were expecting 50, an improvement from 48.7 - instead we went down to 42.9
* Bad economic news in China creates a terrible response, but bad economic news in the U.S. and no one even cares!
* Why, because the Fed tells us everything is awesome and we can ignore all the evidence that the economy is far from awesome
* Singapore reported a 5.7% increase in GDP for its 4th quarter, yet that number is being discounted
* Yet no one wants to believe the good news from foreign governments, and no one believes bad news from the U.S. because the Fed's narrative is still out there
* We got more bad economic news today: We got another PMI manufacturing number expected to be 52.8, it came in at 51.2
* Even worse was the December ISM number - last month was 48.6 - it was expected to improve to 49.2- instead, it dropped to 48.2
* That's a bigger miss than China, yet no one here cared
* Also, construction spending was a huge miss: the consensus was for a gain of .7; instead we lost .4
* It gets worse, because last month the gain was expected to be a full point
* The numbers that came out today were so bad that the Atlanta Fed, who recently revised down its Q4 GDP forecast from 1.9 to 1.3 a week or so ago and today they went down to .7
* In my last podcast, I said that soon the Atlanta Fed is going to take their Q4 GDP estimate below 1 and that is just what they did
* We have a lot more bad economic data that is going to come out between now and the end of the month when we get the first estimate of Q4 GDP and there's a pretty good chance that it will be negative, which is halfway to a recession
* With a negative GDP in the 4th quarter, we have a better than 50/50 chance of having another negative GDP in the first quarter and that would put us officially in a recession
* Just in time for the Fed to raise interest rates again - Not!
* More people are coming to the same conclusion I have for a long time now, that the Fed had backed themselves into a corner and felt they had to raise rates regardless of the fact that the data didn't meet their criteria
* I knew that if the Fed raised interest rates that they would regret it because they would have to reverse their direction based on the weak economy combined with a weak market
* Interestingly, there has only been one year ending in "5", Our Sponsors: * Check out Justin Wine and use my code SCHIFF20 for a great deal: https://www.justinwine.com Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy