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Message| (1,313)    Markets Become Backward Looking  As we have
previously argued, financial markets don't 'know' anything,
especially close to major turning points. Conventional wisdom
eventually almost always turns out to be dead wrong, and quite
often the valuations that are accorded to securities strike one
as absurd in hindsight, even if one only considers what was
already known at the time when these prices were paid.  What has
become especially notable in recent years is the extent to which
financial markets have become dependent on central banks and
have begun to mimic the methods employed by central bankers.
These methods consist by and large of looking at the data of the
immediate past, pretending that these tell us anything about the
future, and then deciding on monetary policy in knee-jerk, ad
hoc fashion. That is basically the degree of 'planning' employed
by our vaunted central planners. It would of course not help one
bit if they