Thoughts on the market

I've been gambling in the stock market since 1984. Back in those days the Federal Reserve and the US Government weren't involved much in tampering with the market and let it follow the ages old business cycle. Gambling was fairly easy back then. You could buy and hold which worked well over time over you could try to figure out where you were in the business cycle and be in on the upswing and get out on the downswing. 1994 was the first big sea change when the Fed became involved with the Mexican Peso bail out. That was the first time they got involved in market manipulation and they haven't stopped since. All of a sudden the ages old business cycle became distorted. When business slowed the Fed would unleash a blizzard of borrowed money and blow a little air in the bubble thereby short short circuiting the natural business cycle. This first occurred on a large scale in 1998 which led to the massive bubble bursting in 2000 when the Nasdaq collapsed. However I digress. Starting in the mid 90's personal computers and the internet became very popular. A whole raft of what I labeled "Gurus" popped up with blogs on the internet with varying methods of tracking and predicting the markets. As the years went by one by one their various theories stopped working and they disappeared off the net. One guru in particular got it right every time. He predicted every major turn and some of the things he predicted he did so 10 years before they occurred. I followed and kept in touch with him via e-mail for 20 years. Last week I got a farewell e-mail from him. He is shutting down his blog and no longer trying to follow the market. He lays this decision at the feet of the Fed and the Government. The markets are so manipulated and so much money is being created that the business cycle no longer exists. We are living in an artificial bubble economy that is kept blown up with trillions of dollars of borrowed money. This too shall pass but no one knows for sure when. As John Meynard Keynes once commented " The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent ". That is precisely where we are today. This is all going to end badly and I'll go out on a limb here and predict 2016-2020 will be terrible years for the US economy. We may or may not have a correction late summer this year but if we don't the bottom will fall out starting 2016. Right now I have no bets on the table so as usual I'll keep you posted.