Stock Markets: When Will the Bull Return?

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The process is so critical to the stock market that Richard Bernstein, chief investment strategist at Merrill Lynch (BAC), is tracking six signposts for financial industry consolidation. Among them: the extent to which the government carves up and sells bad banks rather than buying into them to prop them up.

Other strategists are keeping a close eye on the people who really know what's happening in the economy: business leaders. Biderman says he'll know corporations are getting confident once they start buying back their own shares and acquiring other companies. Right now they show no such bravado. Announcements of share buybacks are down 90% from a year ago, leaving that market thermometer so cold the mercury is off the scale.

In the end, the timing of the bear's retreat will likely hinge on that great market imponderable: psychology. How investors feel has a lot to do with whether they start seeing mixed signals as proof of a glass half-full. "The [market] stress causes the analytical part of our brains to shut down, and that makes us hyperreactive to bad news," says Michael A. Ervolini, CEO of Cabot Research, a consultancy catering to institutional investors. People become convinced conditions are worse than rock-bottom bad, he says. Only after they see that they've overreacted can things improve: "We look for the market to start [saying] tomorrow will be brighter."

For now, pessimism is winning the day. In the worst-case scenario, bad debts will continue to weigh on borrowers and lenders, causing the economy to slow even more, which will erode incomes and push more borrowers over the edge. Economies and corporations around the globe will weaken and rattle investors and business executives even more. Such fears have prompted Ben McCoy, a 30-year-old software engineer, to swear off new stock investments. Instead, he's putting money into his own business ventures, such as writing software for real estate appraisers and a blog about personal finance called moneysmartlife.com. "With these investments, I feel like I have more control," he says.

More Ben McCoys could signal the stirrings of an upturn. A market bottom, says Merrill's Bernstein, "generally occurs when everyone thinks it will never happen. You want to hear people giving up on the stocks-for-the-long-run theme."

But something positive must draw investors back. George A. Akerlof, a Nobel prize-winning economist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of a new book, with Yale professor Robert J. Shiller, on the importance of sentiment in moving markets, says investors will have to be offered a new story they can believe to get them to buy again.

That new story likely involves corporate and consumer debts being reduced to what borrowers can pay, freeing them of past mistakes so that new money can be put to productive use. Banks resume lending, and the stock market bottoms, signaling that the recession will be over soon. Budding optimism reverses the vicious cycle of losses. A bull is born.

A more probable outcome is the one drawn from the narrow history of bear markets that grew out of financial crises. In it, the bear scenario continues to play out until the bull takes over, with more debt busts and government trial and error until things get set right again. That could mean two more years of bouncing around and then another six or so before the Dow is back above 14,000. Not long ago, such an outcome would have seemed unimaginably bleak. Given the other possibilities, it doesn't seem so bad now.

with Tara Kalwarski, Ben Levisohn, Amy Feldman, Peter Coy, and Mara Der Hovanesian in New York and Christopher Palmeri in Los Angeles

Henry is a senior writer at BusinessWeek.