All right. I'm on with Ben Carlson of a wealth of common sense. Ben say hello.

Hello. So I thought you were posed about the dreaded earnings recession is one of the best things

I've read so far this year because I think this is going to be the topic in the financial

media between now and when we start first start getting first quarter reports which I guess begins in in April

What was your idea behind writing it? This is actually one of those blog posts where you go in with an idea and maybe a conclusion

already formed in your head and then you run the data and sometimes the data surprises you.

And that actually happened to me in this case because I was kind of shocked. I wanted to see what happens

when earnings are down in a specific year, how does that impact the stock market?

Well wait, let's first, first of all, let's just define what is an earnings recession well I just

looked at it as earnings are down year over year so I guess you could look at it

any way you want but I looked at it on a year over year basis how or and so I took the Schiller data goes back to like 1870, I went to 1930,

and looked at it on a year over your basis, whether earnings was growing or falling basically.

And you found how many, how many years in that number of years did we have down earnings?

So we were close to 90 years in total and there was 30 of them that were down.

Okay, so that's a third of the time earnings for year over year, which I think is probably the first thing you might have been surprised about.

Yes, and then the other one was there were only a small percentage of those down years and earnings where stocks were down to and so it was like seven times out of those 30 that stocks were down so more than two thirds of the time when earnings were down. So more than two-thirds of the time when earnings were down, stocks were actually up.

And there was also on the flip side where earnings were up and stocks were down, which happened

like 15 times.

Yeah, so I'm looking at this table is incredible.

So you're showing the seven years where both earnings and stocks went down and then the column

next to it is almost triple the size and some recent years where earnings

went down year over year but stocks went up anyway.

...