Gold prices ended slightly lower, but climbed higher after release of Fed minutes. U.S.stocks rally after Fed minutes revealed a more dovish stance than investors expected. Gold last traded at $1,305 an ounce. Silver at $19.77 an ounce.

The stock market has rebounded somewhat over the past two days but there are indications that the sell-off could resume.

Technical analyst Louise Yamada says the stock slide isn’t over just yet.

“I don’t think the pullback is already over,” Yamada, of Louise Yamada Technical Research Advisors, said on Tuesday. “I think that it’s an interim pullback, and we’ve certainly seen what we’ve expected, in the Internet and biotechs coming off. And I think that although they may bounce, there’s probably still a little bit more to go on the downside.”

The selling could spread to other sectors, such as aerospace and consumer discretionary stocks. Yamada says the weakness in stocks lines up well with broader bearish indicators, such as the fact that 2014 started with a weak January, and is a midterm election year.

Another sector that has been in the spotlight recently has been banking. US banking regulators on Tuesday ordered the eight largest “too big to fail” banks to raise capital levels in a bid to address weaknesses seen in the 2008 financial crisis.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the robust capital standards — the banks will need to raise a reported $68 billion in additional capital — were “essential to reduce systemic risk and mitigate the distortions imposed by institutions deemed too big to fail.”

The banks affected are Bank of America, The Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo.

The move is designed to help ensure banks can remain on their feet when the funding market for banks suddenly dries up in a crisis, as happened in 2008, when governments were forced to step in and prop up financial institutions.

This is just the latest sign that there are serious concerns about the health of the banking sector and its ability to withstand an economic and financial crisis.

Let’s face it: you don’t keep ordering banks to prepare for crisis if you don’t have a concern that a crisis is on the way.

The Federal Reserve may be imposing policies on the private sector but the private sector has its own opinion of Federal Reserve policies. Wall Street in particular has been the beneficiary of the Fed’s loose money policies. Now that the Fed is tapering Quantitative Easing and making noises about eventually raising interest rates, Wall Street is protesting.

The latest Fixed Income Forum Survey from global rating agency Fitch Ratings showed that money managers desire the Federal Reserve to maintain their loose monetary policy. According to the data, 70% of the respondents said the Fed’s monetary support is either important or critical.

Rising interest rates are negative for the bond market as they depress the prices of existing bonds.

The money managers also see one major risk to the economy: the labor market. Most believe the employment situation is worse than reported in official statistics–something we’ve been pointing out for months.

There is another long-forgotten factor that may be creeping back into the economy: inflation, in the form of rising prices. Extreme weather has thinned the nation’s cattle herds, roiling the beef supply chain from rancher to restaurant. As a result, beef prices have reached all-time highs in the U.S. and aren’t expected to come down any time soon.

The retail value of “all-fresh” USDA choice-grade beef jumped to a record $5.28 a pound in February, up from $4.91 the same time a year ago. The same grade of beef cost $3.97 as recently as 2008.

Soaring beef prices are being blamed on years of drought throughout the western and southern U.S. The dry weather has driven up the price of feed such as corn and hay to record highs, forcing many ranchers to sell off their cattle. That briefly created a glut of beef cows for slaughter that has now run dry.

The nation’s cattle population has fallen to 87.7 million, the lowest since 1951, when there were 82.1 million on hand, according to the USDA.

Finally, as we have reported repeatedly over the past several months, there is a long-term trend to supplant or even replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. One candidate to step up into the dollar’s place is the Chinese yuan.

Numerous reports have shown nations declaring interest in or directly discussing diversifying away from the US dollar. Standard Chartered bank notes that at least 40 central banks have invested in the yuan and several more are preparing to do so. The trend is occurring across both emerging markets and developed nation central banks. Perhaps most ominously, for the dollar, is a former-IMF manager’s warning that “The Yuan may become a de facto reserve currency before it is fully convertible.”