Herb's take on today's mareket action

Herb Greenberg is one of the few talking heads on tv I actually don't mind listening to. His latest on his blog after the wacky market action today.

My 2-cents: If I haven't said it once on TV, I've said it way too many times -- and today's action in the stock market underscores it better than most: There simply is no conviction in this market. For weeks I've been hearing examples of companies that have either reported or warned of dismal results, or disclosed something fairly unsettling, only to watch their stocks fly higher. This has been a "buy today, ask questions tomorrow" market. The most astounding thing I heard came from Larry Kudlow a week or two ago, when he was trying to say that a Dow of 14,000 meant there would be no recession. "Larry," I said (and I'm paraphrasing based on my memory of the moment), "all the a Dow of 14,000 shows is that stocks went higher. There are stocks and economies and sometimes they go in opposite directions." Predicting whether the economy will slip into a recession is a fool's game, but to say the market's rise was predicting one won't happen is foolhardy. If you didn't know better you might think that now more than ever the market is really driven by computer programs that are steeped more in the minutia of technical variations than a reflection of reality.