The market was a little hesitant towards going up this morning, and I was a little worried because the consumer confidence and home prices data did not look so good. Consumer confidence was the key for economic recovery, which has plunged to the lowest since 1967, when the index was first measured while home prices had the largest drop in 21 years.
However, all fears seems to have erased and the market bounced back fairly quickly after the Chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben S Bernanke, testified in congress that the recession could end as early as this year.
“Could”, of course, means there may be a “could-not”, but any assuring remarks from the government is something that investors are definitely hope to hear.
S&P ended up bouncing back to above 750 points, which is something that I feared it would stay below or drop further for a while.
However, the question remains:”are we there yet?”
Frankly speaking, I would pay someone 1000 bucks if he could convince me we are definitely at the bottom, and it is a good time to buy some oil while short on gold, a typical bull-market strategy.
The reality is, there are still questions remain to be cleared before the market advance further.
AIG is still in talk with the government to try to spend more money in reviving what was once a giant in the insurance industry (or perhaps spend those money on more luxury holiday resorts).
Citigroup, although far from collapse, remain unclear of the direction that it is heading to in the next couple of months.
Finally, the automakers are talking about merger, but whether they could survive to the day merger happens remains to be a huge question mark.
On top of that, we still have to face the reality that the general public are still in fear of what is going on.
The remarks made by Bernanke, to me, is more like a defibrillator to the economy – the heart will beat for a second or two regardless of who the defibrillator is applied to, live or dead.
However, whether it is the magic pill of revival remains to be seen.