This U.S. bull market looks mighty unimpressive from overseas

Deficit spending, falling home prices, trade deficits we are all set for the suckers to get in the market and get killed again.I am not a a pessimistic person by nature but all indicators for a strong underpinning of the dow are weak and the price keeps going up.Hello 1929.

Actually, I think the Dow is rising in large part because most of the companies on it make a significant amount of their money overseas. The global economy is booming, and when the dollar falls those overseas profits look even bigger. Which won't necessarily go on forever, but also isn't necessarily indicative of an about-to-burst bubble.

Watching the stock market is boring.

It's funny to see anti-republican journalists trying to spin the current five-year bull market as being unimpressive. Really. All they did was make a sad effort to twist some numbers around, making the bull market seem tame, and put it in graphic form. Basically, they're doing it because otherwise they'll be fired: they have nothing left to write about that's negative.

The reason for the bear market of 2000-2002 is obvious: clintoonomics was at work, and the bubble burst on the tech rally. Every economist (not reporter pretending to be one) knows that it takes approximately two years for the new administration's economic policies to take effect...hence, from 2001-2002/3, there was a recession/depression as we got the evil clintoonomic plans off the shelf and implemented the current strategies. Now, we have a BROAD BASED rally...all sectors are firing on all cylinders. Now, rallies cannot indefinitely continue, and I fully expect the cycle to conclude by 2009.

Thomas Billis: great attitude! Go live in a cave! You'll be safe that way.

It's a shame Time continues to pay Fox's salary. As we can see, without his hype-graph, the Dow has risen 40 percent or so since January 2003, when Bush's economic policies went into effect. I think he's just angry he didn't own any energy stocks. Then again, little libbies are angry about everything.

I would guess that Fox's salary is less than a rounding error on Time Warner's bottom line. And it is a worthwhile investment if it stirs up such enmity

All I know is that my Time Warner stock has been flat for months, so this can't really be a bull market

As for the "evil clintoonomic plans," I'm not going to give Bill Clinton and his economic advisers credit for everything that went right in the 1990s or blame George Bush for the 2000-2002 market downturn, but if AlessandroMagno wants to use stock market gains as the measure of presidential success (which, again, I wouldn't recommend), then I'm afraid Clinton wins that contest hands down. I guess the other contenders would be Ronald Reagan, LBJ, Ike and Silent Cal Coolidge.

I sure didn't know that my son was an anti-republican journalist!!

To AlesandroMagno if living in a cave means that you accept reality and do not ignore neagtive facts thank you.Even the price of caves has gone down.

clintoon wins nothing: the market gains were largely in one field: tech. The broad market rose much more slowly then than it has in the past 5 years.

Allessandro,

The tired old "liberal media" charge is inappropriate here. Correcting for the value of the U.S. dollar is not some spurious twisting of the numbers, as you put it. Rather, it allows us to accurately compare statistics from today to statistics from yesterday. You wouldn't compare the price of bread from today to the price of bread 10 years ago without correcting for inflation, would you? Likewise, it makes no sense to compare the DOW of today to the DOW of yesterday without at least taking into account the changing value of the U.S. dollar (i.e., the weaker the dollar is, the more the Dow average will be artificially inflated). Such a practice isn't political spin; it's sound statistics.

By the way, since you want to bring up partisan politics, not only did tech's do better in the clinton years, but also the housing market and retail market. To me, that's a fairly broad piece of the market. However, as Fox said, it's really not a good idea to look at overall stock gains as a measure of presidential economic success.