“It’s almost worth the Great Depression to learn how little our big men know.” —Will Rogers
The bottom line is that there can be no rational expectation that things will get better.
…the mini-booms we’ve seen each year for the last 3 years were ephemeral, lasting only a few months. There is nothing mysterious about this in so far as these episodes were necessarily mirages.
These brief outbursts of hope did not rest upon a foundation of fundamental economic health.
Volatility is an expected outcome in an environment in which central banks alternately do and do not bankroll the stock market, which itself is an emotional non-indicator of our economic health.