[Notary Sojac]

stabilization at a permanently lower per-capita GDP

Since most of the GDP "growth" of the last fifteen years consisted of pumped-up consumer goods spending financed by overseas borrowing, no one should be surprised to see this happen.

[lentulusgracchus]

Right, but none of the "playahs" are saying it in public. They're talking "Happy Days Are (Soon) Here Again" and hoping that investors will bail them out by piling back into the stock market so the happy times can continue -- without a fully discounted correction of the Fed's pumped-up market peaks of 2000 and 2007.

Investors and traders don't believe it -- they're staying away in droves, and all the volume that is driving the averages higher since last November, esp. since the March low, is coming from a short-list of stocks being played furiously by back-office black-box operations, many of them fully automated, at a few of the big investment banks, esp. Goldman Sachs. The market is a chimera, a charade.

And it still hasn't corrected properly, and both "it" and everyone watching, knows it.