are something you can't measure. We all know the fundamentals don't look good going forward. However, you can't account for the government literally dumping trillions of dollars into the economy. I've been burned many times in the emerging markets by politcal risk ... especially in an election year. That's one of the reasons those markets trades at a discount.

That's why the markets can be a deceptive when measuring the overall health of the economy. You saw this in the Nikkei decades ago.

I can give you a good analogy. In the early 2000's, the KOSPI was the best performing market for a couple of years when the global economy went into recession. Why? The government loosened regulations on the consumer credit markets (i.e. credit cards). The initial growth in the consumer market was massive as debt grew. Guess what happened? The bubble burst. It took years for the Korean economy to recover.

We better pray the economy recovers quickly or the consequence will not be pretty.