Pavlov should have worked with Wall Street's bulls. With tiresome predictability, the best-known of these still declare the stockmarket to be oversold, share prices to be at a bottom, with a rally imminent. Their upbeat predictions now fall on ever more sceptical ears, especially since the combined interest-rate cut of one percentage point in January has not produced—at least, not yet—a sustained recovery in share prices. By February 22nd the Nasdaq index had lost all of the 25% it gained after the Federal Reserve unexpectedly cut rates on January 3rd, and is back to less than half its value of a year earlier. The S&P 500, dominated by bigger companies, is also down this year, by 3%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is below where it began the year.
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