The futures were boogying "all night long."

THIS is why we love being born-again bulls.  China’s Hang Seng down 578 points on the Hangs Seng (2.5%) - It doesn’t matter!  Shanghai down 3.1% - It doesn’t matter!  Europe down half a point - It doesn’t matter!  Germany’s economy contracted 5% in 2009, the worst decline since WWII (the big one) - I doesn’t matter!  ABC Consumer Comfort Poll drops 11% with just 9% of Americans rating the economy postively - IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER - because WE are those 9% of Americans, right!  OUR economy is just fine and we don’t know what that 91% contingent of babies is whining about do we?    

Yes, it’s been a while since I dubbed us in a Meatball Market.  The last market I labled as such was November 30th, 2006, when the Dow broke through 12,000 on the way to 14,000.  Our bullish picks that day included BA, CAT, COF, DOW, GE, HD, JWN, QQQQ, TIE, TIF, XLE and XOM.  Those were all, of course, fantastic picks but what I want you to do is read the October 2nd, 2007 article, where I began to turn cynical on the "Meatball Market" and I made the following statement:

Up, up and away - it’s Super Market!  It’s bugdet proof, oil proof, terror (threat) proof, housing proof, inflation proof and pullback proof - 3 weeks in a row!

This is truly a Market of Steel (and the recent movement of X underscores that) and looking at the movement of the past week we really do have to believe it can fly…  Is the US consumer (driver of 2/3 of the economy) really impervious to harm?  What, if anything, is our stock market Kryptonite?

Unstable currency, runaway commodity prices, spiraling inflation, low savings rates, hedge fund collapses, declining home values, banks writing down their portfolios, hundreds of thousands of layoffs, millions of foreclosures — it simply does not matter as long as they are LOCAL problems for the US as we are a smaller and smaller cog in the great global economy, one day we may even be granted emerging market status by our Chinese masters!

Doesn’t sound like much has changed in 2 years does it?  Unfortunately, that also happened to be the day that Alan Greenspan (now working for PimpCo) decided to call China, with the Hang Seng then at 28,199, (gasp!) a bubble.  "If you ever wanted to get a definition of a bubble in the works, this is it." he said, at the end of a third quarter in which…