Was the crash manufactured?

Disclaimer, this post was sitting as a draft since November if 2008 and I just now decide to publish it (March 2009)

You are going to think I'm crazy, but something doesn't feel right about this crash. Granted, I've only lived through one crash before where my focus was on the market, but this crash feels like it has been manufactured.

The whole time, I've been running under the same rules that I did the last three years. Find a good company, predict what their business will do and use that to invest in the company or not. My friends will tell you that I have been right most of the time until this year. This year has really sucked. Every call I make on a company's performance is right, but the behavior of the stock goes the opposite direction.

I just figured that it was me until I put two and two together last night when Jim Cramer mentioned that you could tell which way the market is going by watching XOM. Previously, he had mentioned that AAPL, which is a favorite stock of mine was a "tell".

Which is what made things click for me.

I think that AAPL was a target at the start of this year by people trying to take down the stock market and bring upon a crash. I think that XOM and other Dow Oil stocks were jacked up so that they could be brought down in the same way that AAPL was - hard. By proxy, if AAPL drops 50%, the Nasdaq drops with it since it is so large a portion of that exchange. XOM and other Oils drive the Dow and much of our economy.

Think about it, have we really had a recession this whole year? Has it felt like things have been slow until the last two months? The American people have been largely oblivious until this stock market crash in October that we were in any trouble at all.

I mean sure, we are in a recession now, but without the news on CNBC and the constant battering of stocks causing people to start contracting, would we be here now? Would it be this bad?

I don't know.