As you know from my posts of the last couple of months I believe the stock market is going to be a tough place to be for some time. Bear market rallies can be very powerful, and can even retrace 50% of their losses. However, I very much doubt that this will be the case in this particular bear. The reason: while the stock market may already be down 40% from its highs, the economy is just now heading into a recession…one which I believe will be an incredibly painful one for most people. Historically, the stock market begins to recover from a recession about half way through it, which tells me that we have at least 6 months to a year before that will be possible. In addition, this will not be an ordinary recession. For one, the credit market is dead to most, and it will continue to be very difficult to get loans. Since our economy is now a debt based one, this is bad news indeed, and once layoffs begin to ramp up (just as they did this past month with 159,000 people losing their jobs) the...