Jobless rate highest since ... right before the greatest bull run in history


The headlines are terrifying. The jobless rate is the highest it's been since 1983 -- 8.1% -- and it could get worse.

"We'll be at 10% unemployment by year end," Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, told the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). "What's going to stop it?"

The gloom and doom crew has been winning the day lately, but here's the question: What does it all mean for stocks?

Go back to 1983 for the answer -- four years after BusinessWeek had declared the permanent death of equities. That year marked essentially the beginning of the greatest bull run in history. From 1982 through 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared from 800 to over 11,000.

What prepared the market for such an unprecedented run? A big part of it was the overwhelmingly negative sentiment surrounding the stock market at that time. All the "weak hands" had ditched the stock market in a fear-driven panic, leaving the market with nowhere to go but up once the economy started to show signs of life.

None of this is to say that we've reached the bottom of the market, or that we're about to go back up again. But the point is this: Near-record unemployment has not, historically, been an omen of bad things to come.

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Last updated: February 13, 2012: 08:01 AM

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