I think most of the shorts are just downside protection. The strong rally is just the concerted plunge protection team that has been manipulating the market similarly for years now. Enjoy the gains and resume whatever strategy you had before the run up. Nothing much has fundamentally changed, and if the Federal Reserve doesn't raise interest rates it may imply a much worse outcome than them raising rates due to an improving economy with inflation.

LOL put this down to the fact banks and governments should never trust each other because by and large they are all run by self centered cheats and liars. The reason why much of this will come to nothing is that they will have to wait a good hundred years or more to get their gold back and when they realize this fact they will shut up because they don't want the market to know they already have been conned.

Hmm, well given they are single handedly destroying the credibility of the monetary system and undermining capitalism maybe they should start worrying. We should worry when they start building huge holes under the ground to hide from the starving masses they create.

I welcome competition to banks, especially banks more interested in their own trading and gambling than lending to businesses. However, I also feel that there is a lot of risk in this model that will likely not just affect investors but will wipe out those lending money to their clients. The last thing America needs is looser lending practices and financing options to those who can't afford them. Invariably, this is not just unqualified people's borrowing more than they can handle, it is a systemic problem reinforced by social media that encourages people to spend and borrow more than they can handle endlessly.

It is good that at least one person is educating the public on the con game banks are doing on taxpayers through lobbying their legislators. In reality, much of the bubble that we will sooner or later see pop is caused by the bank gambling and taking action against their own clients in order to generate profits in the short term which by result creates the potential for a catastrophic loss later. This is where the TBTF and taxpayer backed gambit occurs much the same way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and ended exposing the taxpayer to hundreds of billions of dollars of loss.

There is no banker who thinks the reserve funds banks pay into will cover the massive losses of even 1 even larger TBTF bank than before the last crisis. They will be laughing all the way to the bank with your money once again.

This is similar to the bubble that was created in Texas that ran Texas into the ground. Oil is just the tip of the iceberg of mal investment and now to correct those mistakes the costs to the economy to turn around will be even worse. The worst mal investment is not oil or the stock market but the TBTF bank financing which has helped them swallow more and more of the financial sector and pushed them into gambling themselves including gambling against their own clients.

Despicable as always. Of course, half of the politician don't bother reading or understanding half of what they pass anyways. There should be a rule in Washington, don't pass anything you don't understand completely.

The best news was it was private sector growth unassisted by new government programs. The worrisome aspect was that it was small business growth and factory growth which tends to rise this season and or is a sign the economy is topping off before a new recession. Given the length we have gone since the last downturn, I wouldn't be surprised if it is because of the latter effect.

If the central bank allowed deflation at the start of the recession, by now people would have saved and then be spending strongly on what they need. Rather we are now getting a gas driven savings way too late and headed into another recession. Let us hope that a natural recession takes place that restructures our economy and generates savings through deflation that can be redirected to the strong components of our economy rather than misaligning wealth to massive failures like TBTF banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the rest of the miserable government love children.

Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame, they are different sides of the same coin. The only way to change the mix is to get another fiscally conservative party in the mix, but then how can they compete with the free gluttony promiser parties we have now.

The second component is the central bank which we need to reign in. However, they have been captured by the mess and are now part and parcel of the problem using QE to help finance the already out of alignment deficit. It would be hard to get a non-QE fiscally conservative central banker in except when the system is close to failure and then it would probably be too late.

We are in an inevitable economic calamity of our own making which results in the same catastrophic economic collapse as all those countries who adopt socialist solutions to replace real capitalism. Let us hope that some generation will say "If not we who; if not now when" and mean it.