Did anyone else notice that the alarming stock market plunge was followed by false reassurance by the mainstream media, and then convenient distractions in the news via tragic mass shootings and other scandals to keep our eyes elsewhere while the patchwork game to prop the market back up where completed. And, voilà… back to normalcy and new artificial highs. Everything is fine… just go back to your mobile phones and TV entertainment.

Is the Stock Market Now "Too Big to Fail"?

by Charles Hugh Smith

Who knows what will trigger Fed intervention; that information is asymmetric, i.e. only known to Fed insiders.

Correspondent Bart D. recently speculated that the U.S. stock market was now "too big to fail," that is, that it was too integral to the global financial system and economy to be allowed to fail, i.e. decline 40+% as in previous bubble bursts.

The U.S. stock market is integral to the global financial system in two ways.Now that investment banks, pension funds, insurers and multitudes of 401K retirement plans are dependent on current equity valuations, a crash would impair virtually the entire spectrum of finance from hedge funds to banks to insurers to pension plans.

A decimation of these sectors would impact the U.S. economy and thus the global economy very negatively.