So, the Dow is at record heights and we’re in the middle
of one of the biggest bull-runs on Wall Street in the past several decades. But
no one seems all that excited about it.
Conservatives, of course, are not thrilled because this
milestone occurred on Barack Obama’s watch. It’s pretty hard to argue that the
president is a radical socialist when investors are living it up.
The traders at the NYSE also don’t seem terribly impressed.
“There’s no massive sense of euphoria,” Kenneth
Polcari, director of floor operations for O’Neil Securities, said in a Wall
Street Journal story. “Years ago, there was more excitement.”
At the Huffington Post, Mark Gongloff offers a nice
summary:
“The Dow is now up 118 percent from its bottom almost
exactly four years ago, making this the third-strongest bull market since World
War II. Throughout these four years there has been little sense of excitement
about it. Almost everybody has reason to hate the bull market. Conservatives …blame
it purely on easy money from the Federal Reserve, as if that is
a novel affront to the natural order — ignoring the fact that the Fed has had
its hand in the market for decades now. The old adage about the Fed ‘taking
away the punch bow’ didn’t start under Obama or Ben Bernanke, after all.
“Liberals, meanwhile, can hate the rally, too, because it
is most rewarding to those who seem least to deserve it: the already wealthy,
including the bankers and grifters that got us into the financial crisis. And a
rallying stock market is an insult to the 12 million people
who are still unemployed amid the worst labor-market recovery since World
War II, or the 14 million people whose home prices are still underwater, or an
entire nation of wage-earners who have watched their take-home pay stagnate
while corporate profits soar.”