Thoughts

INTC is a huge and positive tell that it is trading higher on lower guidance.

Remember it's how stocks react to negative news that is more important than the news itself.

Many of the structural headwinds have already been discounted in share prices.

The current state of investor sentiment that Jim Cramer related in a piece today seems eerily reminiscent of 1979 when Business Week captured the zeitgeist of investors in the infamous Death of Equities cover. Of course, it was almost all uphill from there.

The "joke" of pessimism is that, in normal times, the sort of downbeat characterization that Cramer writes about is typically associated with market lows, not Hindenberg Omen and Black Cross breakdowns.

We have already seen a lost decade in equities.

From my perch, the next decade looks better than the last decade, as many of the structural headwinds have already been discounted in share prices.

Steve Liesman and Becky Quick on CNBC asked James Bullard the right questions and let him respond in an expansive manner.

The St. Louis Fed President's clear responses should dull some of the market's current concerns.

This was one of the best interviews I have seen for some time in the business media.

The Fed's Bullard spoke about the structural increase in unemployment, a thesis I posited several weeks ago.

Again, as I thought yesterday, the slightly better jobless claims report appears to take the doomsday/Hindenburg out of the picture.

I remain somewhat more constructive on the U.S. stock market than most.

As I have written, the U.S. stock market is statistically cheap relative to interest rates and corporate profits.

My greatest concern is not in the economic statistics but rather that we get into this vortex of further consumer/business confidence erosion, stemming from policy and soft home/equity prices.