That didn’t take long. We’ve just had another short-covering rip from the 1870 Bullard Bottom on the S&P 500 and it’s already petered out. Not even another one of the St. Louis Fed President’s bouncing billiard balls could keep the machines slamming the buy key.

And that’s why there is a monumental market storm brewing dead ahead. Yes, James Bullard is a complete joke who gives zig-zagging a whole new meaning. After yesterday’s about face from rate increase hawk to dove, I’d even be inclined to designate him as a “monetary whirling dervish”. His policy pronouncements fit the urban dictionary’s definition perfectly:

(n.) A person whose behavior resembles a rapid, spinning object. These actions are often spastic fidgeting and incessant babbling. The actions of the whirling dervish are irritating and annoying, often exhausting other people in the immediate vicinity.

You can’t disagree with that, but the issue isn’t Bullard; its the entire central bank policy regime that is now racing towards a fiery dead-end. Bullard is just idiomatic—–the least reluctant of what will soon be a desperately flailing gaggle of Fed heads trying to explain that recession has returned, but that they are out of dry powder without a clue on what to do next.

So it won’t be long before we get the big breakout to the downside. The stock market has been churning and cycling in no-man’s land between 1870 and 2130 on the S&P 500 for 700 days now. There have been upwards of 35 rally attempts and all of them have failed, including this most recent machine driven three-day spasm.

^SPX data by YCharts

It is a sheer understatement to say that the market’s generals are in full retreat and that the internals are looking ever more precarious. As to the latter, fully 60% of the S&P 500 members are down 20% or more and are thereby already wrestling hard with the bear.