The markets just chopped largely sideways today, apparently just treading water while the politicians "play house" in D.C. SPX lost $5, closing at $1693 and RUT softened just a bit, down just one dollar at $1074. Consistent with the lack of market price action, trading volume was flat with 2.1 billion shares of the S&P 500 trading. Trading on the NYSE dropped 3% and trading on NASDAQ increased 2%. Today was the fifth successive day of declines for SPX.

Orders for durable goods came in at a meager +0.1% increase in August, but that was better than the 8.1% decline we saw last month. New home sales reported 421 thousand for August, up from July's 390k. So the real estate data continue in a positive direction.

I came across an interesting set of data on ZeroHedge.com. He plotted the FOMC predictions for GDP growth for this year. It has declined steadily and dramatically: in January of 2011, the Fed predcited growth this year of 4.2%; in Jan 2012, it dropped to 3%; in Jan 2013, it dropped to 2.5%, and in this last report last week, the prediction is down again to 2.2%. No wonder Bernanke doesn't think the economic data support removing stimulus. But all of this worries me. Over a trillion dollars has been added to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet with all of this quantitative easing and our debt is up to 17 trillion dollars, double what we used to call excessive debt. I confess that I don't know where this takes us, but I don't think the unwinding of all of this will be painless.

My Oct iron condor on RUT stands at a P/L of -$670 or -3.6% with delta = -$88 and theta = +$129.

Watch the 50 dma of SPX at $1680. As long as SPX doesn't break that level, I think we will just consolidate sideways as we watch the politicians fight - but I prefer watching football.