No one knows what to say. My take - investors, pro or amateur, are just dumb and don't remember 73-75, the last great cyclical, broad-based recession. Broad-based because the price of oil effected everyone and OPEC laid it on us because Nixon devalued the dollar by unlinking it with gold. 1987 was a market crash, and temporary. 2000 was a tech bubble. 2008 was a housing bubble. These were sector crashes, but didn't involve everything like 1974. Now we have everything, except maybe software and consumerism.

Anyone who thinks this Fed will tame inflation with .5% rate hikes all the way to ... are you ready for it .... 3 percent is stone cold stupid. It took 6-8 years for inflation to roll through the 1970s before Volcker gave it hard medicine. 14% was hard medicine. 3% is a candy bar. 3% might reduce inflation to 5-6%. Won't that be great? Powell has no idea. We are so screwed.

On my agenda this week .... hi yield bonds, yes or no. Oil stocks have made a 3 bar move and most broken out ... will we see 20% higher from here rapidly, or is there a short opportunity.

Housing went rocketing with Toll Bros. LEN soon to report. Value funds did well in the 1970s, though there were few around of any distinct variety. They were just funds with managers and names, no classification other than stock, bond, mixed, growth. No index funds really. You followed fund managers.

and the line to pick up the checks stretched all the way around a city block. Nobody asked what jobs you'd applied for because there weren't any, not even fast food and diners were hiring.

We were young and unencumbered. It was a nightmare for people with mortgages and kids and it went on for months and months.

We started to take it on the chin when the jobs came back and a bunch of corporate types thought double digit inflation was a dandy time to hold wages down. And they did. Wages have never recovered the purchasing power they had in the early 70s, not even close. The minimum was a thrifty but living wage in 1970. It's far below bare subsistence now and Congress is sitting on its hands.

As Brian Rogers of T. Rowe Price used to say: The end of the world doesn't happen very often.
The world is very different from the 70s. I suspect gas is now a lot cheaper in real terms.