Before everyone gets overly excited and decides to go out and short the market, just think of what would have happened if you had gone up to ANY economist twelve years ago and told them nonchalantly....

"Yeah, sure, they'll change the FASBI rules so you can completely mark to fantasy, and the FED will secretly hand Europe nine trillion dollars, plus engage in another twenty to thirty trillion in various support programs, and stuff Freddie, and Fannie with three to five trillion dollars worth of toxic crap plus add another trillion to their own book, in addition to two trillion in US bonds.... 

The banks won't foreclose for years on past due mortgages, we'll have three to five million homes in the "shadow inventory" and the banks will create about one hundred trillion every year using this newfangled synthetic financial instrument called a derivative, for a completely unregulated, opaque market which no one can value, worth well over one quadrillion in notational.... 

They'll use this one quadrillion plus in derivatives to attack the European Union's Euro and bond markets, the FED will openly admit that they're using all this excess liquidity to artificially prop up financial assets, over forty percent of the US companies' "profits" will come from Wall Street shuffling all this paper around, which will generate well over two hundred billion in bonuses for the Wall Street crowd....

The US government will be creating two to three billion in debt every single day, banks will steal billions in their customer's funds, not give them back, NO ONE will ever go to jail, and no one will really care....." 

....and so on for another hour or so, assuming any economist would still be standing there listening to your calm explanation of how everything they believed in was wrong, and not calling the guys in white coats to haul you away.

However, whether they stayed or fled, called the guys in the white coats or not, ALL of them, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM would think you were a stark raving mad lunatic WHO DID NOT HAVE A CLUE!! 

And yet here we are, it's all come true, it's getting worse every single day, nobody's doing anything about it, and it all goes to show reality doesn't really matter to the "markets" or the Fed, any more.

Maybe Karl Rove is right and "they" really can "create their own reality."- mpg