RUSH: On the market, there’s so many things here to observe about this.  The stock market is down 4,000 points since October.  It’s now down to 21,990.  It’s barely under 22,000, down 455 for the day.  You know what short sellers are, right?  These are people that bet on prices of things to go down.  You know who one of the biggest short sellers in the world is? George Soros.  This is how, in fact, he has made the lion’s share of his fortune is betting or going short on currencies.  I have no doubt that Soros is in the mix here.

Raising interest rates, the Federal Reserve, can have a deleterious effect, but not to this extent.  I mean, the Fed raising interest rates by itself is not responsible for this large a sell-off. And, by the way, I was just reading CNBC.  This is the kind of garbage that you really should ignore.  They’ve got a story that says, “Hey, we could be in the beginning of a six-month correction,” meaning this is only the first of six months of this kind of stuff, which I don’t think is the case at all.

But sit tight, my friends, throughout the broadcast today, because we’ve got these three primary things we want to address today plus all the audio sound bites blaming me for every bit of it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Stock market is down over 4,000 points now since early October. And you had the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin calling the six largest bank CEOs to assure them that there’s still credit, there’s still liquidity in the credit markets, meaning there’s still plenty of money to borrow, the institutions are alive and well and making sure that these banks know that, not to start tightening up, and everybody said, “Wait a minute. Things must be wrong if the guy’s making a phone call.”

It’s kind of like when the manager or the owner gives the coach a vote of confidence. The coach is soon to be fired. Mnuchin announces that he’d made this call. Nobody was thinking about this ’til he made the call, ’til he announced it. Now everybody’s concerned Mnuchin’s calling to let ’em know that there’s a concern about liquidity and credit, and this has unnerved people.

People I know in the financial business — and by the way, they’re a different breed. You would not believe the emails I get from these people. This is the biggest thing in the world in the last 20 years, this current activity with the stock market. It’s all they’re talking about, thinking about, writing about. I’ve never seen such pessimism. It’s a unique breed of person in that business. But, anyway, Mnuchin going on and on and on about, you know, whether or not credit is available, trying to assure people that it is, it’s just added to the nervousness that is already being felt by a lot of people.

But there’s so much going on. You remember quantitative easing when the Fed just started printing money left and right and most of that ended up as purchased securities in the stock market, did you know that the Federal Reserve, recent financial reporting today, the Federal Reserve is actually insolvent, they’ve got about $39 billion in capital, and they just had to write off $66 billion in losses on securities holdings, i.e., the bad mortgages they bought up in 2008, quantitative easing.

Remember all that worthless paper that all the lenders kept selling and reselling and reselling, lying to people. It was these mortgages that never had a chance of being paid back because they were given to people that couldn’t pay ’em, people that didn’t have jobs all because Obama and the left thought it was unfair that not everybody could have a house. So the government was forcing and pressuring lending institutions to make loans to people that would never pay it back. We got the subprime mortgage crisis, and it was the Fed that ended up buying up all that stuff, and that was quantitative easing. They were printing money to buy up that worthless paper, and it was being turned over to the stock market.

Well, at some point it’s all still worthless! It still has to come due! I mean, all of this that was printed to buy a bunch of stuff that ended up having no value whatsoever, they started acquiring this stuff in 2008, quantitative easing. And now the Fed is raising rates and trying to sell off some of the bonds and other things that are in their, quote, unquote, portfolio.

It’s not an immediate crisis in terms of the liquidity ’cause they can always print money to cover itself, but this just has people very jittery. And, folks, I’ll tell you, it all can be traced back to that stupid subprime mortgage. At some point all of that has to be paid for. All of those worthless mortgages being repackaged as different product and then sold and packaged again and sold.

And meanwhile, none of these things they were selling were gonna produce any income. They were mortgages that were given to people that had no jobs. So the Fed does quantitative easing, which is printing, and this was to prop up the Obama administration in part. The money ends up in the equities markets, the securities markets. And we’re now at a day of reckoning.

Now, you add to this the raising of interest rates. Trump is exactly right about this. The Federal Reserve is doing great damage to this economy by raising rates. The market, quote, unquote, just gets paranoid over inflation. Whenever there is the slightest appearance of any or the thought there might be some, they start talking about raising rates to slow down an economy. The last thing in the world we wanted to do was slow down the economy unless there were some people that wanted to damage Trump!

With as discombobulated as the Washington establishment is over Trump and the fact that they haven’t yet been able to get rid of him, as far as I’m concerned, every possibility is on the table to explain this. There could be a whole bunch of justifiable reasons why this is happening. And there could also be reasons that people would chalk up to conspiracies or what have you.

Now we’ve got Bank of America telling reporters at CNBC this morning that, “Hey, this is a long overdue correction,” meaning this stock market should have never, ever made it to 25,000. It should have never made it to 26 thousand, whatever. It was all illegit, and this correction has been long overdue and the people at B of A are saying this correction may go for another six months, which I don’t think is gonna be the case whatsoever.

At some point people are gonna get tired of watching their portfolio shrink and do whatever they can. What Mnuchin was trying to activate here was something called they called a plunge protection team to initiate the plunge protection scheme. And it’s all based on assuring the markets that there is enough liquidity for credit, meaning for people to borrow, to expand, for whatever reason. And as long as that’s the case, then all the rest of this is not that bad.

But if the credit markets dry up, then there’s real panic. Because credit is all this market has been since quantitative easing. I should go back to my transcripts and look, ’cause I have been suspicious of this, when I found out what it actually was, quantitative easing was just printing money to handle subprime mortgage crisis, and that money ends up at the stock market. Because the rest of Obama’s economy was stagnant and flatlined, except the market was just skyrocketing upward, which everybody in the Obama Regime was pointing to.