What to think about the current rally?

A brief post to sum up a bit of my week-end reading. Nothing really new for the past few days...

Jim Rogers said on Bloomberg:

"The rally is awfully powerful and my experience taught me that rallies of this magnitude last longer than anyone expects, especially the skeptics."

WSJ:

"By far and away the strength has been in financials and consumer" stocks, notes Neil Hokanson, a Solana Beach, Calif., adviser. "And when we look at the underpinnings in both of those areas we don't see any reason for that level of optimism."

[...]

Financial stocks in the S&P 500 are up 76% and consumer-discretionary names, which include autos and restaurants, are up 43%.

Business Insider:

Now that stocks have rallied nearly 30% off their low, pundits agree: It's a new bull market. So be very afraid.

Market punditry is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. Pundits are excellent at describing what has happened, not what is going to happen.

Mish:

it's important to remember we are in this mess because Greenspan elected to blow another bubble rather than face what would likely have been a short-term recession of limited consequences. Instead, Greenspan elected to bail out his banking buddies who were in deep trouble with loans to dot-com companies and Latin America. The fruits of Greenspan's attempt to bail out banks were worldwide housing and credit bubbles of epic proportion that have now popped, leaving banks much worse off than before.

Compounding Greenspan's errors, the trio of Bernanke, Geithner, and Obama, like the trio of Bernanke, Paulson, and Bush before them, all seem to think the results will be better this time if we just do it again with more force.

I have news for all of them. While we may not be able to predict for certain the consequences of "Stupidity Squared" we can say for certain the result cannot possibly be any good.