As the stock market’s slide extended into a sixth straight week, its longest since the financial crisis, one question emerged among investors hoping to begin browsing for bargains: Are we there yet?

After all, the market looks oversold. More than half the stocks within the S&P 500 are plumbing 20-day lows. The crop of stocks still holding above their 50-day averages has swiftly shriveled to less than 25% from more than 75% just two months ago. The roster of issues vexing the market—slowing global growth, $4 gasoline and the impact of European debt restructuring on banks—hasn’t changed much. How long before drab economic data loses the sting of surprise?

But the problem with stocks’ orderly decline—with a loss totaling just 6.8% over six weeks—is the absence of the kind of concentrated selling that points to exhausted negativity and that draws buyers en masse. On Thursday, for example, stocks rebounded to snap a six-day losing streak, only to skid anew Friday. Option traders also seem reluctant to bid up puts to hedge their portfolios, and the risk forecast as quantified by the VIX volatility index hasn’t budged much above its four-year low.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended last week down 199 points, or 1.6%, to 11952. The six-week slide is the blue chips’ longest since 2002. The S&P also slid for a sixth straight week, its longest swoon since July 2008. It’s still up 1.1% this year, but both the Nasdaq Composite and the Russell 2000 have slipped into the red. The NASDAQ lost 89, or 3.3%, to 2644 last week, while the Russell fell 29, or 3.5%, to 780.

For now, investors might take solace in steady credit markets and stocks’ unthreatening valuations. But without capitulation, equities may enjoy a short-term bounce, although a more lasting recovery may not occur until the economy accelerates again, or until companies convince investors they will weather this soft patch just fine. And that could take time.

Also, Wall Street analysts haven’t tempered their estimates much despite waning economic data, and still expect profits to expand more than 20% in 2011 for a record third straight year. “The disconnect between economic, sales and earnings expectations appears to have widened in the last two months,” notes Ed Clissold, Ned Davis Research’s global equity strategist. “We aren’t saying that earnings are heading toward a hard landing,” he adds, but the risks to profit expectations are gathering to the downside.

Over the past four quarters, U.S. nominal gross domestic product has increased $564 billion, while our federal debt has expanded by $1.36 trillion. “It has taken $2.40 in fresh federal borrowing to generate $1.00 in U.S. GDP growth,” says Douglas Cliggott, Credit Suisse’s U.S. equity strategist. Still, the gain stretched profit expansion into a 10th straight quarter. But because the average expansion since 1949 has lasted 14 quarters, this cycle “is now the rough equivalent of a 57 year-old human being in America—still pretty healthy, but not as strong or energetic as it was a while back,” he argues.

There were, of course, cycles that lasted 32 quarters in the 1960s, 31 quarters in the 1990s and about 20 in the mid-2000s, but those saw either robust job growth or strong private-sector credit creation. A “meaningful acceleration” in the next six months in either private debt or employment would make Cliggott more optimistic. But, “unfortunately, neither one of these normal demand engines has been running with very much intensity so far” (Source: Barrons Online).