While the United States stock market looks feeble, many other markets around the world have performed even worse.
Wednesday was a rocky one in general for tech stocks, which have been feeble of late due to worrisome data out of Asia signaling PC demand is slowing.
Widespread calls by political leaders to overhaul the health care system have hit the stocks, as has consternation over the feeble state of the industry leaders' pipelines — the inventory of drugs at various stages of development.
Not stock photos or airbrushed history or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others.
Much of that feeble growth will come from a turnaround in the inventory cycle as companies stop de-stocking at the scary rate that exacerbated the recession in 2009.
John Buckingham, chief investment officer at Al Frank Asset Management, also marveled at how well companies were doing in a feeble job market, and he wondered how high corporate numbers and stock indexes might go if employment picked up.
To prevent "the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism," he urged "stern compulsion," which might take the form of marriage restrictions or even sterilization.
But as long as the stock market stays up, complaints from the shareholders are going to be pretty feeble.
However, stock market investors pretend to believe – or even have to pretend to believe – in those feeble and ephemeral stories because they need those stories to justify (to themselves and their clients) staying in the stock market, given the low returns everywhere else.
"For a fire to keep on burning late into the night, you need the logs to catch, and the world's economic firewood has long since been soaked by oversupply and feeble demand now exacerbated by a post-bubble psychology discouraging risk taking," observes Gross, who still believes stocks are overvalued.
