Janet Yellen continued her testimony today and stocks continued their slide.  The Dow was down over 400 points at one point.  The sell-off in US stocks followed another huge global sell-off.  This morning, the Swedish central bank, Riksbank, cut its bench mark interest rate again and is now a -.50.  Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves stated "unfortunately the world looks different to what it did in December,"  and went on to say "The period of low inflation will be longer than we expected, increasing the risk of weakening confidence in the inflation target ... and (of) inflation not rising toward the expected target," of some 2 percent in 2017.

There seems to be a growing trend in negative interest rates, and Yellen got grilled on the US’ stance.   For now, it remains to be seen if the Fed will back off its stance of hiking rates.

The US dollar continues to decline against a basket of currencies including the Yen and the Euro.  So much for negative interest rates helping those economies as their currencies are strengthening on the news, the opposite of what the central bankers had hoped to achieve.

News that the SEC is investigating Boeings (BA) accounting practices on its 747 and 787 planes caused the stock to tank more than 10% and added to the Dow’s losses.

Oil plunged and WTI is down over 2% to $26.86 and Brent is $30.40.   US Treasuries are also down, but have stabilized some after the most recent bond auction.  The 10 year had dropped to 1.55%, but has recovered to 1.62%.  The 30-year bond rose to 2.49% from 2.4% after the auction, but is the lowest level in a year.  Good time to buy a house or refinance, again.

One of the few bright spots in the market is Gold, which is up about 5% today to $1248.50, the highest level in over a year.  The gold miners are up about 7%.  We have recommended that clients own GLD as a hedge.

This morning we got the latest US weekly jobless claims that came in at 269,000 well below the analyst estimates, and 16,000 lower than last week.  But even that hasn’t been enough to boost this market.