Barring a miracle reversal on Friday’s employment report, the next stop for me is $17-18.

It’s frustrating and frankly unbelievable given the liquidity spigot the Fed and global central bankers have opened up, but it is what it is.

Unfortunately, exchange rates (i.e., the USD) seem to matter more than the absolute quantity of currency in the system.  So that means as long as the ECB, BoJ and SNB are willing to stay more loose than the Fed, the USD will rise and commodities and gold and silver will come under pressure.

We saw this in 2013, when the day after the Fed announced QE3 and gold bugs were taking a victory lap for “being right,” the BoJ announced  an even bigger QE program and gold and silver proceeded to tank.

This is why Powell can so confidently state that inflation will moderate–because it probably will due to a rising USD.  It seems to me the US stock market will continue to be the prime beneficiary of the global liquidity spigot–US megacorps are able to play the stock buy-back game at ultra low interest rates, which in turn just further cements their monopolies and power since smaller competitors don’t have nearly the same access to capital markets.