Since the market “bottomed” on July 15th, we have seen a tremendous rally in all major sectors outside of materials and energy. But is this the end of a bear market or just a big short squeeze?

To answer this question we can look at historical bear market duration and price declines, and a technical picture of the market.

Historical Statistics

TheCuriousInvestor's take on recent good results by Walmart, Costco, and Target. It's a quasi-rebuttal to the article I posted here - > http://www.feedthebull.com/content/economic-stimulus-checks-help-retaile....

he global stagflation of the 1970s is often blamed on both causes: it was started by a huge rise in oil prices, but then continued as central banks used excessively stimulative monetary policy to try to avoid the resulting recession and stagnation, causing a runaway wage-price spiral. Déjà vu, isn’t it?

Let’s explain stagflation through an easy examples:

The typical economic cycle consists of two main phases: Boom and Recession. The phase leading to a boom is called expansion and that leading to a recession is called contraction. Another way of looking at this is, considering expansion the transition from recession-boom and contraction the transition from boom-recession.

Alexei Miller, chief executive officer of Russian-based OAO Gazprom, the world’s biggest natural-gas company, has said that crude oil prices will reach $250 a barrel in the “foreseeable future.”

British inflation reached its highest rate since the Labour government handed over monetary policy responsibilities to the Bank of England (BoE) in 1997, reports Bloomberg.

At 3.3%, inflation is way above target (2%), and BoE Governor Mervyn King has conceded that it could breach 4% later this year.

Finance ministers at the G8 summit in Osaka, Japan, have warned that stagflation — recession coupled with high inflation – is now a more serious challenge to global growth than the credit crisis.

William Patalon III in Money Morning sees a universal theme emerging: Inflation, Inflation, Inflation…

As the financial services giants get cut down to size, metals are now the biggest source of mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, according to a report on Bloomberg.

Nixon and his advisors thought inflation at 4% was serious enough to institute price controls. Headline inflation in the US is now 4.2%. What kind of economic policy should we pursue to bring inflation back into the Fed's comfort zone of 1-2%? Would it work and would it be worth the pain?

DailyWealth editor Steve Sjuggerud isn’t perturbed by gloomy foreclosure predictions…

With key countries in the world economy spiraling toward recession, and even India and China panicking about domestic inflation levels, there’s one country in particular that still seems to offer good value in its equities markets, thanks to an economic outlook that combines decent growth and only modest inflation.

Increasingly in recent weeks commentators have begun speculating about the dreaded “S-word”- stagflation- and whether or not such a protracted period featuring both high prices and high unemployment would blight the U.S. economy.

Oil rises $10.75 to $138.54, jobless rates spike to 5.5%. If these are not bad news, I don’t know what is. Not surprisingly, Dow Jones came down 394.64 (or 3.1%) to close at 12,209.81, its biggest one-day decline since the subprime mortgage crisis in February 2007.

The world is officially in the throes of a food crisis. This article hints at some of the medium-term and long-term implications that may arise out of the global food crisis.

From Tokyo to London to New York, financial companies announced plans to shed more than 83,000 jobs since last July as revenue and compensation pools evaporated, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg.