General Janet Yellen went up the hill to discuss the un-discussable with a body of politicians who have made her job impossible – a nine on a scale of ten, ten being most difficult.

She began by commenting on the fairly obvious.

U.S. equities dodged the bullets that shot down European indexes and the Nikkei today. The latter was down not quite 5.5% on the session.

Line up all the different investments available right now and consider how they are behaving.

Gold is bellowing like a bull, drawing in money that is afraid of a half dozen trends and possibilities. Good for gold – it’s been undervalued for so long that it is like having an old friend you haven’t seen for a long time show up unexpectedly at your door.

Today it will be good to remember one portion of the famous passage that opens A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:

“…It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

The looping, swooping, rising and falling in crude today dragged U.S. equities along for the ride. West Texas Intermediate at one point was up to $33.50 per barrel while Brent hit a slightly higher level.

Both crudes are now off 1.75% to 1.90%% on the day. Natural gas fell 2.75%.

Before moving on to specifics concerning the day’s market movements, we’d like to clear up a fashionable theory about sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and the falling prices of equities.

The general notion is that petro-states are drawing down their SWFs to plug gaping holes in budgets. (In fact, they are borrowing to do so.) But let’s say for a moment that the SWFs were being sold off.

Oil prices today sank again on inventory and overproduction, dragging equities with them. The Dow, S&P and NASDAQ are all down about 2.00%. NASDAQ is the weakest as Alphabet – Google – lost half of its gains from today’s highs on profit taking.

Gold, ten-year bonds and the greenback are stronger on risk aversion.

Unless oil recovers enough to be reckoned as “stable” by other elements in the investment community, there will be trouble in the equities.

This is because if oil remains low there most likely will be a special factor driving it down – weakness in the other two big economic regions beyond the U.S., namely Asia (China/Japan) and the European Union.

The Bank Of Japan’s sudden move into negative interest-rate territory seems to have taken the entire world financial realm by surprise. (We also applaud how they were able to keep it under wraps right up to the announcement.)

It certainly proved incredibly salutary for equities markets around the globe.

After rising dramatically early in the day, crude oil prices are about 4.40% higher in late afternoon trading. Allegedly the Russian energy minister said that Saudi Arabia had proposed that oil-producing countries trim output, which would be the first reasonable move to help clear a glut that has depressed prices for about eighteen months.