Permanently Low Level?

The following graph of durable goods orders shows why Wall Street in on a boomlet:


The good news is that the economic collapse of Sept 2008-Jan 2009 is now done. So the stock market has "recovered". But if you look closely, there is no "recovery" in Main Street. We are at a new "permanant" low.

This brings to mind an infamous quote by the eminent economist Irving Fisher given just days before the famous 1929 stock market crash: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

It only took just over a decade to recover from "Fisher's plateau". Let's hope it doesn't take a decade to recover from this new "plateau" shown in the above graph.