Republican Replacement Won’t Fix ObamaCare – Ep. 262

Summary:
Once again the solution doesn't work.  As with the Democrats' solution, the penalties are too low.  In both the House and the Senate, trying to force people to buy insurance won't work because the penalty for not buying insurance is not stiff enough. The reason they aren't doing that is, politically, it is a losing proposition. This is why the Republicans never should have touched this issue. If they did not have the guts for outright repeal, they should have never done anything. They should have left it alone and the Democrats would have owned this disaster. The best thing the Republicans can do, politically, is do nothing. In this way any collapse cannot be attributed to ambiguity in the market.
Downward Pressures on the Dollar

* Very big day in the market today; the most significant being the breakdown in both the NASDAQ composite and the U.S dollar.
* The dollar was down sharply and broadly today, led lower by a rally in the euro
* The catalyst for the euro rise was statements by Mario Draghi early in the morning where he commented that downward pressures on inflation were transitory
* A somewhat hawkish stance on inflation and the markets took that to mean that QE will come to an end sooner rather than later
* But I think the markets are looking for any reason to trade the dollar lower
* I have been talking about that on this podcast, that the dollar has been looking weak
* It broke down again today, the dollar index down just over 1 full percentage point on the day
* The dollar trading at its lowest level in 8 months
* I think this was the lowest closing level in about 9 months
* The euro is trading at a 113 handle

NASDAQ Woes

* At the same time the dollar was breaking down, so were tech stocks, the FANG stocks were particularly weak
* The NASDAQ composite down just over 100 points on the day
* That's a pretty big move; a 1.6% decline
* The Dow was only down about 100 points, just under a half percent
* So the NASDAQ experienced about triple the decline
* I talked about that on this podcast a couple of episodes ago when we had that one really big reversal day in the NASDAQ stocks
* When the NASDAQ stocks made an all-time record high and then closed negative
* We had that kind of flash crash coming into the final hour of trading
* To me, there was some big money that decided to get out of those stocks