Afternoon Notes – 3/11/2022

Good Afternoon:

• Day 16, where is Fauci? No, really, where is he?
• The “public health” house of Covid-19 cards has collapsed at freefall speed in the last month or so. 
• Every single public health official responsible for (often permanently) damaging our mental and physical well-being with experimental mRNA gene therapy mandates, cruel forced masking, social isolation, and propaganda — down to the county level — deserves the full weight of the legal system pressed on their necks. What they did to children and the elderly is beyond reprehensible.
• Biden’s Lie of the Day: “Make No Mistake, Inflation is Largely the Fault of Putin.” Of course, they all lie in both parties. But Biden’s latest lie is a whopper, and he isn’t fooling anyone. He forgets that real people put gas in their cars every week. They don’t need a government bean counter to tell them what is happening and when.
• The true source of the current inflation is the cumulative increase in the money supply measured by M2 since February 2020—an incredible 41.2%. In January, the growth rate of M2, even after three months of tapering bond purchases by the Fed, was still 12.6% over its level a year earlier. That’s about double the rate it needs to be to hit the Fed’s 2% inflation target.
• Inflation is out of control and will be with us, best guess, until the dollar is gone as the world’s singular reserve currency or the Fed destroys the economy and the stock market with massive interest rate hikes. Inflation will punish the stock market, the real estate market, and the economy at large.
• But have our illustrious overlords learned anything? I will give you $1.5 trillion reasons that haven’t.
• It was a clever move at a perfect time. With Ukraine raging and people traumatized over the war, leadership like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Cal.) kept bringing questions back to $14 billion in aid for Ukraine. Members stressed that there was no time to waste — or in this case to read — before voting.
• And then they voted, $1.5 trillion in deficit spending passed in the middle of the night. Few even read the 3,000 plus page bill. Leadership on both sides held back the bill until the last minute so that nobody had time to read it.
• Our range trade continued intact today. The S&P 500 traveled back down to close at the 4200 put floor, and Weekly Expected Move Low. The 4200 level has been a solid support level with $3.8B Gamma (combining the SPY and SPX) and the largest of any strike.
• At the top of the range, $3.0B in Gamma at 4300 is solid overhead resistance over the past week (although pushing a touch through it on the Putin Pop headline this morning).
• Let’s cover the rest in the weekly outlook on Sunday.

A.F. Thornton