The bear has unfinished business in the stockmarkets

Stockmarkets remain bullish, with the FTSE 100 rising 21% between June and September. And while the liquidity spree could keep stocks fizzing for now, as we noted last week, the medium-term outlook is bleak.

"There's a very big risk" that markets are being "irrationally exuberant", as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put it this week. The overall tone remains bullish, with the FTSE 100 notching up a gain of 21% between June and September, the best quarterly performance since its inception in 1984. And most markets made a solid start to this week too.

Yet there has "unquestionably been a rise in wobbly data again recently", says Lex in the FT. The jump in the monthly US jobless figures after months of falls, along with another slide in hourly earnings growth, poured a "big bucket of cold water" over "the idea that the economy was on a self-sustaining and uninterrupted path to recovery", says Miller Tabak's Dan Greenhaus.

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