Chart Review by Michael Clark “By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”     – John Maynard Keynes SO, IS THIS FINALLY THE ‘REAL’ CORRECTION? What a week it was.  The Bears gave the Bulls some payback.  Obama got a wake-up call.  And the banks got a well-deserved scare (and we hope they will get a well-deserved hair cut). The markets reacted, as one might expect, with selling.  Actually, the selling began before the Massachusetts election and before Obama sent a shot across the Goldman Sach’s bow.  Last week Intel announced surprisingly strong earnings; and the stock started up and then sank.  For the past half-year investor behavior had been the reverse: a buying spree for any stock that did not lose as much as it might have — beating ‘Street expectations’ that had been dumbed down over and over again during a quarter so that the company could report ’surprising’ strength.  Suddenly, now, even good earnings are being greeted with selling.  Then came Massachusetts — wasn’t that a Bee Gees’ song?   All the lights went out in Massachusetts Anyway, readers want to know where the markets stand today, after the sell-off this week.  My view of it — my ‘view’, not my gut-feeling — is that we are, so far, merely correcting from an over-extended rally.  This rally has been bizarre, to say the least.  This has been a ‘fear rally’ — usually the ‘fear’ side of the equation is when selling comes in, ‘greed’ driving the expansion.  But fear of systemic failure has driven this rally; and Ben Bernannke has been the captain sailing the ‘Boat of Fear’,   Ben’s logic — that more debt will solve the insolvency crisis — has a shadow side, the logic that a collapse in stock prices will result in systemic failure, international chaos, revolution, repression…made him believe that preservation of the status quo was requiired, at any price.  A ‘make-believe’ recovery could be jump-started, perhaps, if the Fed could just stimulate (and simulate) another asset-bubble.  After all - that is how his mentor and predecessor, Alan Greenspan, had become the darling of the coctail party crowd, leading member of Time Magazine’s ‘Committee to Save the World’; and that was how he, himself, had become Time’s ‘Peson of the Year’ . Logic was thrown out the window.  Causality no longer mattered.  More debt might cure the problem of too much debt? …