Caterpillar earned $404 million in the third quarter, or 64 cents a share. Analysts had expected only 5 cents. Caterpillar’s stock is up 165 percent since March. How did Caterpillar do it? Not by selling more bulldozers. It did it by cutting more than 37,000 jobs.

The result, overall, is an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street recovery. Yes, the economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies are generating almost as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

The Fed, meanwhile, has become an enabler to all this, making it as cheap as possible for companies to ax their employees. Money costs so little these days it’s easy to substitute capital for labor. It’s also easy to buy up foreign assets with cheap American money. And it’s now blissfully easy for Wall Street to borrow money almost free and buy all sorts of interests in foreign assets, especially commodities. That's why we're seeing the prices of foreign commodities and other assets go through the roof.

At the same time, the Treasury continues to be fixated on keeping banks afloat. The administration's mortgage mitigation efforts are lagging. Small businesses are starved of credit. The White House has announced a "jobs summit," which is better than nothing but not nearly as good as pushing immediately for a larger stimulus, a new jobs tax credit, and a WPA-style jobs program.

The Fed and the Teasury have, in effect, placed a huge bet on a recovery driven by asset prices. That’s a bad bet. The great disconnect between the stock market and jobs is pushing stock prices way out of line with the real economy. This isn't sustainable.

No economy can recover without consumers. Yet American consumers, who constitute 70 percent of the U.S. economy, are facing mounting job losses as well as pay cuts. They’re in no mood to buy and won’t be for some time.

Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy -- both at the Fed and in the White House -- the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats next year.

Investment advice from Ann Coulter? In what alternate reality does that make sense?

Wolcott finishes up his riff with a nice flourish:

...If it were a Republican president in the White House and the Dow was hitting such highs the same week of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hosts and panelists at Fox would be waving little American flags celebrating the market boom as a fitting toast for the triumph of Western capitalism over communism and a rebuke to naysayers and doubters with souls so gray and faith so brittle.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for economic news a little more grounded in the real economy than the ebbs and flows of the stock market, the weekly jobless claim numbers (seasonally adjusted) for the first week of November dropped again, taking the four week moving average to its lowest total in a year. That is good news, unless you're Fox Business, in which case it is probably yet another reason to stock up on gold.

McArdle's thesis is especially provocative, because most market watchers expected that the Fed's announcement that it would keep rates close to zero indefinitely would juice the market. But there's no doubt -- the timing of the market collapse and the news from the Fed were highly correlated.

But there's one other thing that happened about the same time the market collapsed. Noam Scheiber published a post demolishing the absurd thesis that the (then-ongoing) rally was a reflection of Wall Street's enthusiasm that Tuesday's election results represented a repudiation of the Obama "agenda" and "stopping the agenda is good for the market."

As Scheiber writes, "the reasons why this theory is utterly ludicrous are almost too numerous to catalog." You don't have to go much further than contemplating what a six month long market boom implied for Wall Street's faith or lack thereof in the Obama agenda. But moments after Scheiber's post, the rally suddenly ran out of steam, suggesting that, if investors had believed such nuttiness, they no longer did, probably because they had just read Scheiber. Which I guess, perversely proves the original thesis!

The truth, as my readers love to inform me, is that intra-day movements of the stock market are rarely explainable by any one factor, and we shouldn't waste precious blog-space trying to figure them out. But longer term movements are worth some head-scratching, which leads to a consideration of a troubling column published in Slate yesterday, by Dan Gross, "The Mystery of the Rising Stock Market."

Gross argues that the strong performance of the U.S. stock market since March has little to do with the prospects of the U.S. economy, and everything to do with the return to relative health of the global economy.

The Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ are primarily indices of large U.S.-based companies, not main street businesses: more Davos than Chamber of Commerce. These increasingly cosmopolitan firms have been busy globalizing and expanding their operations overseas. In 2006, according to Standard & Poor's, 238 members of the S&P 500 broke out revenues between U.S. and non-U.S. sales. These companies notched about 43.6 percent of sales outside the United States. For large companies that had already saturated the U.S. market, the home market was something of an afterthought. In the second quarter of 2007, 66 percent of Coca-Cola's (KO) beverage business came from outside North America.

This is a point I've been making here since at least last April, when I noticed that the companies that were doing best at resisting the slowdown in the U.S. were the companies that had the most exposure overseas. But while global growth might be good for stockholders and company execs, it's not clear how it helps everybody else.

Gross:

GM's sales in China are rocking. In the first nine months, the company sold 1.3 million cars in China, including more than 181,000 in September. By contrast, GM in the United States in the first nine months sold 1.5 million cars in the United States, down 36.4 percent from the year before. And in September, GM sold just 156,673 cars in the United States. That growth in China is good for GM's shareholders and for some of its executives. But since most of the cars sold in China are produced there, with parts produced by suppliers in China, rising sales in the Middle Kingdom won't translate into jobs for unionized workers in the Middle West.

Before the global recession, there was much talk about whether Asia and the West had "decoupled" their economies. What some of us might not have realized was that the U.S. stock market had also decoupled from the U.S. economy -- and run off with Asia.

Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.

Today, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.

What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for ten months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now.

Second, the banks keep paying off Congress. The big guns on Wall Street increased their political donations last month after increasing their lobbying muscle. Morgan Stanley's Political Action Committee donated $110,000 in September, for example, of which Democrats got $43,000.

Official Wall Street PAC donations are piddling compared to the tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street executives dole out to candidates on their own (or with a gentle nudge from their firms). Remember -- the Street is where the money is. Executives and traders on the Street have become the single biggest sources of money for Democrats as well as Republicans. And with mid-term elections looming next year, you can bet every member of Congress has a glint in his or her eye directed at the Street.

That's why the President went to Wall Street to raise money Tuesday night, gleaning about $2 million for the effort. He politely asked the crowd to cooperate with reform -- “If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms" -- but those were hardly fighting words. It's hard to fight people you're trying to squeeze money out of.

Which is the essential problem.

Ken Feinberg, the President's "pay czar" came down hard on executive pay yesterday, for those banks still collecting money under TARP, as well he should. But Feinberg isn't trying to pass new financial reform legislation, and TARP no longer covers several of the biggest banks with the highest pay and bonuses -- although they're still getting subsidized by the government with low-interest loans.

Wall Street and the Treasury want us to believe that the TARP money will be repaid to taxpayers, but Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general keeping watch over TARP, said yesterday that just 17 percent of the TARP money has been repaid, and “[i]t’s extremely unlikely that taxpayers will see a full return on their investment." Later he told a reporter that it's unlikely "we'll get a lot of our money back at all."

Brian Griffiths, the Goldman international adviser who told us inequality is good for us, doesn't know what he's talking about. America is lurching toward inequality once again, led by the financial industry. The Street is back to where it was in 2007, but most of the rest of us are poorer than we were then -- largely due to the meltdown that occurred because Wall Street overreached. The oddity is that we bailed out the Street, including Griffiths and his colleagues, but apparently won't even be repaid.

And now that Griffiths et al. know his firm and the other big ones on the Street are too big to fail, he and his colleagues will make even bigger gambles in the future with our money.

2. Federal borrowing has filled the gap that consumers and businesses created when the latter began to reduce their debt. Federal debt, in other words, has kept the economy from tanking. Can't keep up forever, though.

3. With such horrid employment numbers, Wall Street figures the Fed will keep interest rates low for some time, and continue to flood the economy with money. That's good news for the Street because it means money stays cheap -- and with cheap money the Street can make lots of bets on almost everything under the sun and moon. As a result, the Street's earnings are way up. But this, too, is temporary. At some point the Fed is going to worry about inflation and a falling dollar.

4. Investors of all stripes want to get in early and ride the wave. Pension funds, mutual funds, and other institutional investors figure the bull market has more oomph in it because, well, other investors will jump in. Think Ponzi scheme. Nice for now, but watch out if you're one of the last in.

In other words, this is all temporary fluff, folks. Anyone who hasn't learned by now that there's almost no relationship between the Dow and the real economy deserves to lose his or her shirt in the Wall Street casino.