MSM: “The stock market is above Dow 11,000! The recession’s over! The economy’s back! Barack Obama is a genius! Happy days are here again!”

Is this more MSM spin?

Is this also market manipulation?

I had a sense that the spin was starting just a few days ago with: FRIDAY STUPID: “Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery” by NYT’s Floyd Norris.

The cover of this week’s Newsweek (Does anyone still read Newsweek? Does it get cash from Soros to post its far-left spin?) is an American flag with the headline: “AMERICA’S BACK! THE REMARKABLE TALE OF OUR ECONOMIC TURNAROUND BY DANIEL GROSS.” Here’s the story:

The Comeback Country
How America pulled itself back from the brink—and why it’s destined to stay on top.
By Daniel Gross | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 9, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Apr 19, 2010

So both Floyd Norris’s piece (New York Times) and Daniel Gross’s piece (Newsweek) spun the same “remarkable” recovery at the same time.

Last week, I posted here that both California and Los Angeles might not survive bankruptcy. Yesterday, I pointed out that New York State will run out of money by June.

Wouldn’t the bankruptcies of both California and New York give national publications pause before declaring that “America’s back”?

We have terrible unemployment numbers. Who’s deciding that now is the time to buy more stocks?

Even with this remarkable year-long rally, if you’ve been invested in Dow stocks for the past three years, you’ve LOST 15.09%.

When the stock market goes up, people are happy. When the stock market goes down, people are angry. Every president knows this, and Barack Obama knows this as well. If the stock market had been tanking, opposition to ObamaCare would have been even stronger. The disastrous “Cap & Trade” (“Cap & Tax”), which should have been dead when Climategate came out, is still on Obama’s table. Without a rising stock market, this tax (and the VAT) wouldn’t stand a chance.

The curious thing about this remarkable Dow “recovery” to 11,000 is that Main Street, for the most part, isn’t buying. Who is buying? The Fed printed a trillion bucks the past year. The banks got about $800 billion in TARP. A trillion bucks can inflate the DOW pretty easily.

It’s like some powerful Democratic strategist said: (1) Onward with our agenda, (2) Play the race card, (3) Inflate the stock market, and (4) Use the usual MSM plants.

Here’s a succinct comment on Business Insider (18 thumbs up, 0 thumbs down):

NoSingleOne on Apr 12, 10:30 AM said:
3 words:
Fed bubble reinflation

Here’s another comment (three thumbs up, 9 thumbs down):

Dan on Apr 12, 7:21 PM said:
@Left Wing Wanker: Goldman Sachs and the Wall St. hustlers have just finished painting the tape to Dow 11,000. Now it’s time for the suckers to jump in and get slaughtered.

From Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture:

Dow = 11,000. Discuss.
By Barry Ritholtz – April 12th, 2010, 9:44AM
Go figure –
Over the past 13 months, the Dow has regained nearly 4500 of the 5000 points it shed in the six month following the collapse of Fannie Mae, Lehman and AIG.

You can debate amongst yourselves whether this is proof that a) Capitalism works; b) Government intervention is more successful then popularly realized; c) the entire thing is a giant, charade, controlled by shadowy players — and GS.
(…)
COMMENTS
HEHEHE Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 10:12 am
BR I’ll spell out this decade for you: collapse, QE1, “recovery”, End QE1, collapse, QE2, “recovery”, End QE2, collapse, QE3 ….WWIII and/or hyperinflation.

1)There is no capitalism in the United States except on the small business level. The major corporations own our government and they work for each others benefit. Hence to big to fail.

2)You take a huge chunk of my bad debts from me and give me treasuries in exchange, allow me to claim that my assets are worth more than they are, allow me access to 0% credit loans that I can then lend out at 5%, plus dump a trillion plus $ into the economy and I’ll show you a good time too:)

3)End of day, the technicals take us higher while the fundamentals deteriorate. You tell me if you remember a time in the past where that recipe worked out well?

If we had some real antitrust laws in this country and had broken up the Wall Street/defense industry/pharma cartels, let the big three fend for themselves, and cut government spending and THEN we reached DOW 11,000 I’d concede your point because it would have been natural growth.

Whomever brought up the Bonds/McGwire steriods analogy the other day was spot on.
(…)
HEHEHE Says:
April 12th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
How much confidence can you have in a banking system when the switch of one accounting rule makes several thousand banks that were insolvent suddenly solvent overnight?

QE=Quantative Easing=printing dollars.

Regarding the 2008 crisis, there is a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission going on. It’s a farce. Everybody “didn’t see it coming.” Everybody is “sorry.” The criminals (Bernanke, Geithner) were promoted or extended. No one has gone to jail.

Last Friday, Jesse’s Cafe Americain wrote:

09 April 2010
Most Wall Street Banks Using Lehman Style Accounting Trickery Enabled by the Fed to Hide Their Risk
This analysis from the Wall Street Journal indicates that most of the big US Banks are engaging in the same kind of repo accounting at the end of the quarter that Lehman Brothers was doing to hide their financial instability until deteriorating credit conditions and liquidity problems made them precipitously collapse, as all ponzi schemes and financial frauds do when the truth becomes known.

The basic exercise is to hold big leverage and dodgy debt, but swap it off your books with the Fed at the end of each quarter for a short period of time when you have to report your holdings.

This could easily be corrected by requiring banks to report four week averages of their holdings for example, rather than a snapshot when they can hide their true risk profiles so easily, compliments of that protector of consumers and investors, the Fed.
(…)
The US is Lehman Brothers on a scale writ large. And when it is exposed by some series of events, the implosion could be more sudden than any can imagine. But in the meantime the US is still the ‘superpower’ of the world’s financial system, through its currency, its banks, and its ratings agencies.

This is worse than the Great Depression. We never before had so much debt. This could destroy our entire nation.

Pass nothing (centainly not Chris Dodd’s “financial reform”) before November. If Republicans don’t win in November, it’s all over.

Happy Dow 11,000. This Lehman Brothers shareholder finds it hard to believe the new spin.