Over the past year there has been some confusion about whether Ben Bernanke has managed to not only completely break the stock market (which, if one harkens back to hallowed antiquity used to discount good or bad news in the future, and “trade” accordingly), but also invert it fully. The chart below from Guggenheim will once and for all put any such confusion to rest.
As Guggenheim’s Scott Minderd points out “The 52-week correlation between S&P 500 returns and the change in the Citigroup Economic Surprise Index has plunged from 0.45 to -0.13 over the past 12 months. A negative correlation indicates that weak U.S. economic data tends to push equity prices higher, while strong economic data tends to send them lower.”
What’s the explanation?
In a similar manner to 2005, when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 200 basis points in a year, the current plunge in this correlation indicates that the expectation of continued monetary accommodation has trumped economic fundamentals to become the main factor determining the near-term outlook for U.S. equities.
In short: a broken, inverted market, driven purely and entirely by hopes of an even bigger liquidity bubble, and even more greater fools to offload to.
And that, in a nutshell, is your “market.”
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/3CoIGprTaWw/story01.htm Tyler Durden