All three of the core premises behind the bull market are coming under questioning

The bull market probably didn't die last week. But its recent ructions might offer a glimpse of its eventual demise, the way bouts of angina can foreshadow a heart attack. The S & P 500 index survived the week virtually unchanged, but only after absorbing its third 3-4% pullback in five weeks, after going six months without even one. At Friday's morning low (which was fractionally above the prior Friday's low), the index was back to a level first reached in late September. On both Fridays, the index managed to rebound to nearly the same spot around 6,730. Revisiting that level from the third week in September brought it back to the blissful moment when I asked here , "What do you get for the market that already has everything?" That was right after the Federal Reserve cut rates into a then