In this week’s Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Mish discuss:
- Wedding Bells For Mish
- Mike tied the knot last week
- FOMC Freak-Out
- Markets react nonsensically to the predictable
- Where to From Here?
- Down – and fast – seems most likely
- The Case For Precious Metals
- Current low prices just don’t make sense
This is a special session of Off the Cuff for two reasons.
First, Mike “Mish” Shedlock got remarried this past week (longtime readers may remember his first wife, Joanne, passed away in 2012 after a longtime battle with ALS). We’re very pleased he’s found happiness again.
Second, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its minutes today. And on a fairly mundane, mostly-predictable announcement, markets went into convulsion. The Dow plummeted 200 points, the US dollar bounced a full percentage point, and bond yields soared. Gold and the Yen sold off hard.
Chris and Mish came up with the title for today’s podcast: Broken Markets. To them, the fact that Trillion-dollar markets reacted so skittishly to such little new news — news that should already have been priced in — shows how out-of-kilter things have become. While we at Peak Prosperity have been beating the drum on this for years, it’s now becoming increasingly visible to the world that our financial markets are not working in the efficient, free manner many have believed them to.
For all the fuss, the Fed — through Ben Bernanke — essentially said: “We’re still planning to inject $85 Billion
by gado 
