S&P/gold reflects gold speculation, so I don't take too much out of that. S&P/oil is more disturbing, because despite the complaints about oil speculators, the

S&P/gold reflects gold speculation, so I don't take too much out of that. S&P/oil is more disturbing, because despite the complaints about oil speculators, the fact is that the current oil run-up has a lot more to do with geology and international politics than "speculators". However, if you want to see the real, incontrovertable proof of a "silent crash", look at S&P/euro. It's ugly. The 1980s-90s bull market was fed by a couple of factors which are not likely to repeat, and if anything, will unwind. The first is that a lot of middle-class people came into the stock market, due to online trading and the replacement of traditional pension funds with 401k plans. Until 1980, stocks were considered a rich peoples' game, too risky for the mom-n'-pop investor. In 2008, after US equities showed an abysmal performance, it's unlikely that many new investors are going to come into them as they did in the '80s. The second factor is that there has been an expansion of large corporations into all aspects of American life, with Wal-Marts knocking out local shops and mass media gaining ownership of average Americans' minds and desires. This trend is going to reverse for two reasons. The first is that our fairly long-standing energy crisis (call it "peak oil" if you wish) is going to make a lot of corporate business models less competitive, leading to increasing localization. The second is that upper-middle-class Americans, who drive the culture and started this trend toward suburbanization and corporatization in the 1920s-50s, just don't like corporate anymore. They buy produce at farmer's markets, avoid chain restaurants, and prefer the internet over TV. These two factors are going to cause a glacial retreat of the corporate state that will continue even once the economy starts to recover.