If markets have rebounded today after the sustained selloff on fresh “stimulus” hopes, then one would have to wonder immediately what the background fundamentals might be. Setting aside all notions of past “stimulus”, the call for more would seem to suggest, quite strongly, something far, far less than desirable. Yet, in the same breath economists and brokerage firms would have it both ways; the market is up because there may be more “stimulus” and also that the market is overly pessimistic. It can’t be both, because if there might be more monetary policy effort it isn’t markets that are psychologically inbounded.

Despite worries about a global economic slowdown and falling oil prices punishing the markets so far this year, a global recession is not in J.P. Morgan’s outlook. “We think it’s really all about negative psychology right now, which seems to be self-reinforcing but not based on fundamentals,” said Santos.

We can’t, however, simply set all aside from before. The two constants throughout the economic period since the end of the last recession have been persistent monetary efforts and the obvious failure of them revealed through nothing more than their persistence. Today happens to be the anniversary for the ECB’s QE which pretends as if it were some new and useful upgrade. They did massive LTRO’s at the start of 2012 and Europe fell back into recession anyway. They have narrowed the rate corridors, stuck Eonia further to nothingness and then pushed it negative with an increasing negative nominal floor, pushed forward with a third covered bond program and then an ABS program; and all of that only accomplished the “necessary” conditions for ECB QE.

It started out last year on essentially a lie:

“One could argue that this type of approach Draghi is using should have been applied much earlier, which would have gotten Europe on a similar kind of platform the U.S. was on,” Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group LP, said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “It is never too late to do the right thing.”

US asset gatherers appear to be very much enamored with QE in all its forms but only when it is actually termed “Q” with “E.”

“We’ve seen over the last few years you have to trust in Mario,” Laurence Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc., said in Davos. “The market should never, as we have seen now, the market should not doubt Mario.”