We peruse the Wall Street Journal’s stock-market round-up each day not to find out why stocks may have risen or fallen, but to determine what factors are conventionally thought to have caused such price movements to occur.  This is an important concern for forecasters, since, even if one attempts to get a read on the market using purely technical means, it still helps to understand what is on the diseased brains of the coprolagniacs whose job it is to manipulate shares to the certain benefit each day of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and other officially sanctioned predators of the securities world. The very difficult task of explaining the stock market’s behavior to readers of the Journal falls most often to columnist Peter McKay, and we don’t envy him his job.  Because he works for one the most important and prestigious financial publications in the world, it simply won’t do for him to say, as we might (and often do), that stocks rose or fell the previous day for no good reason at all – or at least, for no reason remotely related to reality. We think celestial factors play a far bigger role in this than mainstream pundits will ever be permitted to acknowledge, and that a gypsy fortune teller is therefore better equipped than the highest-paid analyst on Wall Street to tell us why the broad averages are likely to go either up or down.

So why did shares dive in the final hour of yesterday’s session after screwing the pooch for most of the day?  McKay cited two reasons: fears related to Europe’s credit crisis, and to the tighter rules soon to be imposed on Wall Street. With all due respect to McKay, this simply won’t wash.  As we all know, investors fear nothing so much as the unknown, and what could be more knowable than the economic fate of Europe?  Does anyone really believe that Greece will not eventually go down, taking Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland with it? Of course not. And that means the markets have already discounted the actual event — or at least tried to discount it, notwithstanding a global monetary blowout that has put trillions of dollars worth of reckless purchasing power in the hands of the aforementioned coprolagniacs.

They will be at it again today, of course, and if it happens that stocks rise for two or three days, or perhaps even for the remainder of the week, it will be written in the weekend round-ups that traders seem to have put fears of Europe’s collapse behind them. In fact, although they should be scared senseless about what lies in store not only for Europe but for the global economy, it is the ceaseless shifting of the sun, the moon and the stars that will continue to shade, and sometimes badly miscolor, their perceptions of the financial cataclysm now bearing down on all of us with irresistible force.

(If you’d like to have Rick’s Picks commentary delivered free each day to your e-mail box, click here.)