Darn, a 322 point rally just after you announced a five alarm fire with the sell all call to boot.

Yes, we’ve taken a hit.  Confidence is way down and that’s what most of the early indicators are showing.  But don’t’ listen to what we say, look at what we buy.  People lust over Apple products, Taylor Swift concerts, and the residential rental market is absolutely booming.  Maybe owning a house is not the best idea for everyone after all.
Europe is a great concern to us but then we appear to be a great concern to them and then the Chinese are a concern to everyone.   The market turned around today simply because it was exhausted not because anyone believes Bernanke has some great plan in the works.    Stocks are remarkably cheap on a DCF model and some on dividend yield vs the treasury and apparently a lot of insiders feel the same way. Insider buying has gone ballistic.  Yes they are all losing money but that’s not too uncommon.   But my guess is within six months most will be proved right.
The biggest risk here is more of the bitter partisanship we have in our political scene.  A divided house cannot stand or something like that. The tea party may have gotten emboldened by the budget battle but I think the S&P debt downgrade smack-down may have sobered them up.  Americans don’t like people that cause the market to crash whether they are terrorists or home-grown patriots.  I perceive some subtle push back on that front so I expect the next round of political squabbling won’t be tolerated at all by independent voters.  Everyone knows they are the ones that win a Presidential election.
I dont’ really get the problem with the Euro currency.  I mean after all didn’t Europe manage to exist for a few hundred years without it?  So just throw the PIGS out or just go back to printing the paper you had before.  It’s just a dye change, a built-in back to work program for the thousands of unemployed bankers who could turn currency traders, and then Spain, Greece, Italy, and whoever else wants to join, get back to their printing presses and pay off their Euro debts with the newly coined currency of the land.  After all there is a lot of people who know how to do that.  Gee, even the U.S. could lend a hand manning the presses.
So in the end, some people are optimists, some are pessimists, but NO ONE is a realist.  Just me.  And I will say you did warn me.
Keep sticking your neck out there, you’re my hero.