Who would have thought lukewarm could be so hot? But it is. The stock market hit record levels four days in a row this week before pausing Friday. The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market index is up 5.7 percent for the year and up more than 200 percent since the scariest days of the last bear market in March 2009. If you are looking for the fabulous economic news that took the stock market out of its recent slump, you won’t find it. Instead, stocks took a turn for the best this week simply because conditions look better than feared after the Brexit vote June 23. Now, the latest economic data on the U.S. show an economy that is OK and some U.S. companies generating more profits than investors were expecting. But that doesn’t mean the economy is sizzling, or that companies are on a roll with their profits. In fact, as analysts look at all the large companies that make up the S&P 500, they have concluded that profits are going to decline on average for the quarter that ended a couple of weeks ago, not climb.
The dubious side of a record stock market
