this comes from inca kola news. it is part of a transcript of a conference call by don coxe of bmo. he maintains that barring a total collapse of the global economy, the bear market has just about run its course. he points to the fact that the financials are now outperforming the general market:

a bear market which is lead by the financials ends when you’ve had a sustained period of outperformance by the banks relative to the S&P. And boy do we have that…in spades. Unless that indicator is totally a false signal this time, what we’ve got is a situation where the performance of the BKX to the S&P is very powerful.

Now, of course it doesn’t mean they’ve gone up. But we’ve had a huge rally on relative strength without going to a new low.

So I have to tell you I try to live by the rules. And this tells me that the Bernanke-Paulson mechanisms are working. And they haven’t run out of ingenuity and they haven’t run out of money. Therefore, I’m of the view that this Mama Bear market should have bottomed out at around these levels, because of the Mama Bear markets of our time, the ones which were in the early ‘70s, at the end of the ‘70s, those two, both of them were down 47 and 48%. And we got to those levels at the depths.

So once again, I would say that unless we are going to have a global depression or this is unique, that we had the required amount to classify it as a Mama Bear not a Papa Bear and that this particular grizzly had done her work.

Now, the argument this of course is well, it’s different this time, because things are worse this time. But I’m not prepared to accept that. Because we’re measuring an index which is basically tied to economic growth within the OECD. And although the collapse in emerging markets would tell you that there’s trouble for the economies that commodities are tied to, and that global growth is tied to, I believe that there were special factors in those and those markets which are volatile anyway will rebound because those economies are not collapsing.

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