Of course money is currently finding it's way to the casino. The process is not over. We're in the midst of it.
I agree with Ned Davis that 6,850 was fair value for the Dow 30. When the stock market fell below that level it created a lot of buying. But now the rally has continued into the greater fool game - hardly unexpected. That's how people react. The stock market experienced a 50% gain after the 1929 crash, before declining a full 89%.
Look at the alternatives. Would you lend more money to an over-indebted business or consumer in the environment of a contracting economy? What is your hope of repayment?
Likewise, people and businesses with little debt have no reason to borrow. With a huge inventory of foreclosed homes remaining unsold, and not even offered to the market, why would a financially solid consumer or business want to borrow to buy still greatly over-valued real estate, or an over-valued business? Financially prudent value buyers don't want to buy and borrow until values appear.
After WW-I the Fed and other central banks made money easily available to counter the depression created by the collapse of prices after the war. This in turn created the Great Depression.
As economist Joseph Schumpeter said,
"Policy does not allow a choice between depression or no depression, but between depression now or a worse depression later.
Inflation pushed far enough would undoubtedly turn depression into the sham prosperity so familiar from European postwar (WW-I) experience, and would, in the end, lead to a collapse worse than the one it was called in to remedy.
For recovery is sound only if it does come of itself. For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another worse crisis ahead." . |