>This isn't about money, Ted; this is about trying desperately to box
>Doug into making irrational claims about the end of the bull market.
>He hates to do it, but he can't help himself.
As I've told you about 100 times, I deliberately didn't say much of anything about the end of the bull market until early this year. Hardcore bears made fun of me for not saying anything terribly bearish in Wall Street; one correspondent called me a "Marxist Irving Fisher" (Fisher having famously said in the summer of 1929 that the market had reached a permanently high plateau) who will be honored in footnotes of the future.
> He feels that the market is out of whack and it *must* go back to
>where it came from for no other reason than ... well, I guess for no
>other reason.
I gave you two reasons recently: a historical tendency for highly valued markets to come to a bad end (a tendency with a 200-year history behind it), and, not unrelatedly, the lure of competing investments (e.g. bonds over 6% and stocks with an earnings yield just over 1%). You want to argue that this is a New Era where those old tendencies no longer apply?
> His latest one was simply that it had entered "old age" - -- and we
>know what happened to Brezhnev when _he_ got old -- as if there's
>something natural or organic going on here.
It was a *joke*, Jordan. Brezhnev - like Yelstin - took years to die, even though by all rights it seemed he shouldn't have gone on.
By the way, the "average" stock, as represented by the Russell 2000, has gone almost nowhere for the last 2 years, while the S&P has kept rising <http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=^RUT&d=5ys> and the NASDAQ has rocketed <http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=^ixic&d=5ys>. Professors of finance say we shouldn't do these things, but it sure looks to me like the era of the Nifty 50 of the early 1970s all over again - a narrow but heatedly speculative bull market that ended very badly.
Doug