Despite a national tax cut and record low unemployment with marginal wage gains, stocks had their worst year since 2008.

The Dow Jones industrial average lost 5.6 percent from the beginning of October to year’s end.The index hit 26,951.81, on Oct. 3 before crashing 3,624.35 to close out 2018 at 23327.46.

I’ll get to the other numbers down below, since you can read them in any stock story today. What I want to tell you is that there was no economic or monetary policies that precipitated such a fall one month prior to the midterm elections.

You see how I tied those two together. I believe part of the Democratic Party’s plan was to take away from President Trump his ability to ballyhoo the market gains under his administration. Remember in 2016 and 2017 the S&P 500 soared 9.5 percent and 19.4 percent.

Make the American people question his tariffs and other trade dealings with China and Europe. This makes sense from the left, since most have a globalist view as witnessed by their actions on the border wall. Open borders for immigration and unfair trade pacts for America are their bread and butter.

I have touched on this last week as it was going on. But the volatility in the markets in the last quarter of the year shows that this was a battle for votes. The hundreds of points moves in the market on almost a daily basis as some institutional investors tried to move the market higher based on fundamentals, only to be licking their wounds at the end of the session as big liberal left money managers booked gains and then sat on the sidelines.

Federal chief Jerome Powell’s actions seems to be working in cahoots with the left. Where was/is the inflation that the Fed appears to be fighting? It’s not there with crude falling and wages only moving up marginally.

Only if you take stock market gains as an inflationary bubble, do you have a modicum of intent. But those profits are only realized when you sell, not when they are paper profits.

The second mandate of the central bank is to achieve full employment, which we basically have now. But if you continue to raise rates — four times last year — you will curtail new hirings as the cost to bring new employees outweight the benefit of staffing up.

In the broader markets, the S&P 500 index fell more on a percentage basis to close the year off down 6.2 percent. The Nasdaq fell 3.9 percent as the high-flying tech giants fell from grace as hedge funds were forced to sell the good to pay for the bad bets made in 2018.

Have a wonderful New Year’s Day and a better 2019. Please like and retweet if this post is informative to you.