xthread | Over the last couple of weeks, a number of people have asked me if it's time to buy in to the market

They've clearly been asking 'has the stock market stopped falling.' The answer is pretty clearly that 'no, it hasn't.' A lot of the fact that the US economy is having a very bad time now, and is going to keep having a very bad time for a while, has already been taken into account ("priced in") by the stock market, but we keep seeing individual firms having a worse time of it than we'd hoped, and in general there's just a whole lot of bad news out there that hasn't become public yet. The problem the current market has is not about 'confidence' or 'sentiment' - the problem is that every player in the economy owes a lot more money than is good for them, and need to repay a bunch of that debt before they'll be able to deal gracefully with the normal ups and downs of life and business.

The best article I've seen all month on this is here. I recommend you read it if you're trying to understand what's going on in the US and world economy.