Q3 of 2009 is the best rally since Q4 1999 – you know what followed? The dot-com crash, see this article:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/163213-ten-reasons-for-an-imminent-stock-market-crash?source=article_sb_popular

umm, Peter, did you actually listen to these vids? check out 6:16 of Aug17th 2009…

Not a good time to be advocating buy metals or miners…

Take a look at a graph of the S&P 500. Everything looks reasonable until about 1982, or so, then we enter Bubbleland. Graphs don’t change slope like that for no reason. That is when the big money interests, who control the US government (enough expensive TV advertising can win any election with a candidate that can talk) gained enough political control to be able to begin to manipulate and deregulate the financial system. The memory of the excesses that led to the Great Depression, had finally faded.
The program was originally managed by President Reagan’s chief of staff, Don Regan, formerly of Merell Lynch.(See Regan telling President Reagan to speed up a speech while he is giving it in Michael Moore’s latest movie, ‘Capitalism: a Love Story’. That says a lot! Who tells the President to speed up in the middle of a speech! Those expensive mikes are sensitive). Don’t forget folks, that President Reagan was associated with General Electric for a good portion of his life. Back then, before the finance bubble boom, that was where the real wealth was, US manufacturing. You had to actually make something to get rich. At the same time, you helped others get richer and society benefited.
Eventually, things changed and the Wall Street elite realized that they could become far richer by using dangerous levels of leverage and then paying themselves huge amounts of money. Think about it, you can only sell so many locomotives. Actually building stuff can only expand so fast. You have to deal with unions and competition. They can mess up your best plans. You can’t pay yourself $50,000,000 yearly bonuses, if the company only made $20,000,000. Not so, if you can create you own money by creating debt thru incomprehensible financial instruments (CDO, CDS, and all the other letter stuff). Computers can spit out infinite amounts of numbers. All you need to do is find a way to make it legal. How easy is that! Spend a few million getting the right people elected or into the right business deals, and any law you want gets out of the appropriate committee, and it is soon a done deal on the House and Senate floor. It was all finished around 2000 by Bill Clinton. So what if it eventually collapses the economy, by then, you will have too much money to even count. If things get really bad in the good old USA, you fly (or sail your yacht full of gold) off to another country.
You can see the result of all this debt creation in the S&P 500 graph. All of a sudden it heads up. Something had to cause that. Did people all of a sudden get smarter or start working a lot harder and longer? Was it all an increase in world trade, or the internet lowering cost? No, it was the dangerous level of debt creation that artificially pumped the markets up.
At the same time, the wealthy had to get the income tax lowered so as to be able to keep the tens of millions that they were making. So they sold tax reductions to the public by giving everyone tax reductions. Everyone got a slice, while they got a loaf. The result of it all is that the top 5% of the population now controls something like 90% of all the wealth. Something like $47,000,000,000,000, while the middle class’s income has actually fallen. Every single person in the USA now owes over $38,000 in National debt. They also had to take care of their children. So the ‘inheritance tax’ suddenly became the ‘death tax’ in their mass media. It worked out very well for the wealthy elite, but not for the rest of us. All those trillions won’t go to pay down the National debt. The folks picking up the garbage and working in hot warehouses will have to take care of it, not the children of the billionaires. The most amazing thing is how few people realize what has been done to them, or rather, what they have actually helped do to themselves with their vote and ignorance.
Oh, and remember how terrible communism was? How we had to draft millions into the military to die fighting the communists all over the globe. Isn’t it funny how you don’t hear much mass media criticism of communism, since the big money guys started making a fortune doing business with totalitarian Communist China. Funny how China is seldom called Communist China in the US Congress anymore too. Have human rights broken out over there all of a sudden? More orders to Washington from above no doubt. The puppetmasters, who really make the laws, are still alive and well on Wall Street.
The next bubble will be some sort of carbon credit trading scheme. We will all pay twice for that one. First, when energy cost goes way up, then when it bursts, and the taxpayers are forced to bail them out, once again. But with the peak oil collapse looming in between 5 and 10 years, I doubt that civilization will last long enough for that to happen. The exploding oil price will probably ruin the financial system long before carbon trading will be able to do so.
Wow, I’ve got a headache now! And I forgot to mention the taxpayer bailout of Long Term Capital Management. We in America are now ruled by a reverse Robin Hood government. It takes from the poor, and gives to the rich.