That 4% market correction was quick and virtually painless. Not missing a beat after the market briefly tested 1900, the dip buyers came roaring back—- gunning for the 2000 marker on the S&P 500, confident that longs were not selling and that shorts had long ago been obliterated. Needless to say, bubblevision had its banners ready to crawl triumphantly across the screen.
When the algos finally did print the magic 2000 number, it represented a 200% gain from the March 2009 lows. And to complete the symmetry, the S&P 500 thereby clocked in at exactly 20X LTM reported earnings based on consistent historical pension accounting.
The bulls said not to worry because the market is still “cheapâ€â€”-like it always is, until it isn’t. Yet now more than ever is the time to keep the champagne corked. The stock charts show an outsized skunk in the woodpile, while the economic data completely belie the sizzling gains in risk asset prices that have been racked up during the last 65 months. Even more crucially, the Wall Street casino’s puppeteers at the Fed more or less admitted at Jackson Hole that they are utterly lost in Keynesian voodoo. To put it generously, Yellen’s speech amounted to a vaporous word cloud wrapped in incoherent double-talk.
In this context, Lance Roberts recently published a stock chart that shows why “S&P 2000″ is yet another signal that a giant financial train wreck is waiting to happen. For a fleeting moment six years ago, the thundering 50% plunge of the stock indices caused a crisis of confidence in the Wall Street casino that had been fostered over two decades by Greenspan and Bernanke. During that short season of trauma and disbelief, the idea briefly resonated that prosperity cannot be built on towering mountains of debt and egregious stimulation and manipulation of financial markets by the central bank.
