Stocks are being managed on light volumes.
At most times the markets are price discovery and capital allocation mechanisms.
Under the current Bernanke-Summers regime, they have become instruments of financial engineering, the shaping of perception, and government influence.
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994