the stock market is just another casino - it's not a reflection of the economy, it's just a venue for people to gamble their savings. it goes up and down based on random trivialities that have little - and usually nothing - to do with the performance of the actual companies.

if investors want the market to go up, it goes up. nothing else really matters. it's just supply and demand, really.

nothing except one thing, that is. the one law it has to obey, whether it likes it or not, is that money has to exist before it can be traded. so, when you suck money out of the economy - which is what the feds are doing - then you necessarily suck money out of the markets at the same time. if a lag exists between a contraction in the market and an application of this policy, a bubble is created.

now, there's no rule that says this bubble has to burst, other than that people have to move their money around at some point. what ends up happening is that people have to sell their investments to pay for other things. this drives the price down. but, so long as people don't sell, so long as they find some other way to make up for the shortfall of the monetary contraction, the bubble floats off into space...

why did we see a crash around christmas, then? because people were reassessing their finances at the end of the year. they may have been selling stocks to raise money for christmas presents, vacations, etc. now, they're sitting at home, leaving their investments alone like they've been told to.

but, all the feds have been doing for years now is sucking money out of the economy, so the underlying cause of the last correction is just building up on itself.

i don't know when it starts to crash again. people don't seem to want to sell...they seem to have a lot of faith in this system, and that's hard to shake.

but, the monetary contraction is a vicious force, and it can't be undone by positive thinking.

it's a matter of time before it happens - and expect carnage when it clicks in.