Quote from Specterx:
I have a grim feeling that we're headed for 1200+ now. It felt to me like this past week was The Decisive Moment when bears had to put up or shut up, put in a real lower high and return in force.
Of course they either got destroyed, or simply refused to even try. Remember the "head and shoulders" from June-July that was all over the news (even mainstream financial sites were commenting on it)? Anyone playing that got blown out - and I think it'll be the same here with this "double top," unless the Fed really slams on the brakes.
Sad reality is that the market is pricing in a full, no-strings-attached government rescue/bailout for any conceivable problem or difficulty. The government can potentially get away with this for years before something significant happens, and while there are massive problems down the road these aren't currently visible on the market's time horizon. Take the China RE bubble, for instance: it hasn't topped out yet, and in the US it was more than two years between the peak of the bubble in 2005 and the market top in 2007.
The corollary is that the markets are staggeringly fragile in that any withdrawal of government support would cause a decline - which is exactly why such support probably won't be withdrawn until either things get back to normal (almost def. not gonna happen), or a real crisis develops.