Charles Hugh Smith | Dec 05, 2014 03:56PM ET
As long as corporations continue borrowing money to buy back their own stocks and the yen keeps dropping, the S&P 500 will continue lofting higher.
Why is the S&P 500 rising, even as valuations are getting stretched, profit growth is declining and sales are stagnant? Two charts explain it all. Here is a chart showing the S&P 500 companies that have been buying back their own stocks (often by borrowing cheap money to do so) and companies that haven't bought back hundreds of billions of dollars in their own stock.
The unmanipulated sector rose a bit, while the stock buyback crowd soared:
source: Business Insider
Here is the S&P 500, with red lines marking its recent lows:
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