As you can see from Springheel Jack's chart of the S&P, we've fallen out of that uptrending range and tested our support yesterday, saved only be a very weak Dollar in anticipation of massive dilution of said Dollar by our own Federal Reserve commencing sometime around 2:30 this afternoon (FOMC announcement at 12:30, Bernanke Speaks at 2:15 and "new open guidelines" somewhere around there) that has sent the Dollar down 2.5% in two weeks.
The Fed will do whatever the Fed will do but, since easing is already widely anticipated, we've generally bet against it into this meeting. Last night, the bears got quite a jolt at the end of a generally bearish day when AAPL announced blow-out earnings, with an 83% improvement in American sales and a 219% gain in Japan. Only the slow rollout of IPhones in China (remember the riots at the Apple store) stopped the company from having a $50Bn quarter.
This is good stuff, it's nice to know that it's still possible for US companies to USE (rather than complain about) the changing Global Infrastructure to create, manufacture and distribute profits to make oodles and oodles of money. So much money, in fact, that AAPL now has $97,500,000,000 in cash and investments on their books – which kind of puts their soon to be market-leading $450Bn market cap into perspective. If AAPL were a country, it would likely be passing Argentina ($435Bn GDP) to become the 28th largest country in the World and settling in right behind Norway ($479Bn) and Iran ($475Bn) – not bad for a country started by two hippies in a garage, right?
Still AAPL is only 1/33 of the entire US GDP so let's not get too excited and pay a little attention to what the other 96.7% of America is up to. That was neatly summarized for us by President Obama last night in his 4th State of the Union message.
I'm already a fan but I thought it was a great speech and I'm sure a lot of top 1%'ers were tossing and turning last night as the President asked for a 30% minimum tax on people earning over $1M per year. While that may not seem like a big deal to you – to someone earning $1Bn and paying a Romney-like 13% tax…
