Systemic Shock Will Kill The Sucker Rally

Lest you think the rallying stock market serves as a leading indicator that good times will soon roll again, along comes Rick Rule to rain on your parade. "The greatest bull market in history, beginning in 1982," he says, has trained people "to believe things will do well and get better"—training he considers lethal—and conditioned them to "buy the dips." Furthermore, he adds, "The amount of liquidity being injected into the system is truly spectacular. . .A lot of the stock market rally has been liquidity-driven." Interestingly, he notes, that liquidity is short term; while banks are still avoiding long loans that they can't resell to the federal government, Rick sees plenty of short-term money, lots of margin, ample lending to hedge funds, capital markets firms and individual investors.

He considers the markets "seriously overvalued," with the economy in no condition to support the capitalization rates, but expects the rally to continue on the basis of those two reasons plus the gradual thawing of bank credit for merger and acquisition activity.

Bottom line, though, Rick calls it "a bear market trap, a real sucker rally. . .driven by liquidity rather than valuation. And when the inevitable shock to liquidity hits—from additional foreclosures, a collapse in commercial real estate, implosion of municipal markets or wherever)—this bull market will be over in a tremendous hurry. He sees a variety of potential catalysts that could take this market down. There's no way of knowing when it will happen and how bad it will be, but he compares the likelihood of it happening to walking through a minefield. The odds are you'll step on a mine and it will explode. "This is a minefield that it would be helpful if you were extremely drunk to stagger through. I do not like the probability of us getting through this without a couple more ugly, ugly, ugly shocks. The idea that we're going to get through this unscathed just doesn't make any sense."