The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep – Frost
Poetry, that's what we got from the Fed's Bill Dudley and James Bullard yesterday, as they both hinted that – not only is the Fed likely to continue QE for "an extended period of time" – but they may EXPAND IT FURTHER if the economy doesn't turn around in the near future.
That's right, the economy sucks and the Fed knows it, even if "investors" don't. Of course, we're in that bad news is good news thing as the bad news keeps the free money flowing from the Fed and, as I say over and over again – a rising tide of money lifts all Financial Ships BUT, that has nothing at all to do with the underlying Fundamentals of the Global Economy, which continue to sink into the abyss.
Of course (and here's where the above chart becomes useful, the same could have been said in 1921 and 1933 and 1974 and 1987 but not in 1942, when we had that really big war to create so much demand we had to ration stuff! Despite my current caution, once inflation does kick in I have no doubt we will hit 2,100 on the S&P (see yesterday's post) – just not quite yet.
What we have at the moment is a frenzy of anticipation that things will get better but it's always "next quarter" or "after the summer" or "next year" while we ignore the NOW that doesn't look so hot.
That's putting us into a pretty extremely overbought position on the NYSE Summation Index (from Dave Fry) and, as you can see from the last 3 years of our rally – this usually doesn't last very long without a pullback. So, forgive me for being cautions just because we did, in fact, drop 10% from the Oct '12 high and 15% from the March '12 high and 13% from the Nov '11 high and 20% from the June '11 high.
We did not, however, pull back in Oct 2010 or Feb of this…
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