Things on Wall Street look pretty good. On Main
Street, not so much.

The stock market jumped another 1.6% last week,
hitting an all-time high for the 36th time this year. Equity markets the world
over rose about 1%.

These
synchronized gains followed Thursday’s appearance in the U.S. Senate of Federal
Reserve Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who has been selected by President Obama
to replace the central bank’s departing chairman, Ben Bernanke. Yellen
indicated there would be no change any time soon in the Fed’s policy of monthly
bond buying, a quantitative-easing strategy that has fueled much of the
market’s gain this year. In other words, tapering remains on hold. What little
concern remained about a policy shift effectively disappeared with her
comments.

On the week, the
Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 200 points, or 1.3% to 15,961.70, and the
Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 28 to 1798.13. Both were new highs. The
Nasdaq Composite index added 1.7%, or 67, to 3985.97, and briefly crossed the
4000 mark for the first time since September of 2000. The MSCI World Index rose
1% on the week.

The Fed’s clampdown on interest rates has fueled a
headlong rush into risk assets such as stocks. The resultant wealth effect
appears to have spilled into the disparate New York City worlds of fine art and
taxi medallions.

An Andy Warhol painting sold for $105 million last
week, the highest price ever for the artist. A Francis Bacon work, “Three
Studies of Lucian Freud,” sold for $142.4 million, a record for a single
piece. At the first auction in five years of yellow cab medallions, a pair went
for $2.5 million, almost double the price at the previous auction. The city
restricts the number of permits to about 13,000 (Source:  Barrons Online).