We are barely four months into the long-awaited market recovery and commentators are already worried that higher energy prices, rising US mortgage rates and excessively optimistic equity valuations spell doom. Markets will happily climb this wall of worry.

The appearance of these three phoney horsemen of the apocalypse reflects the persistence of a depression mindset. The pessimistic argument goes like this: if we are in a second Great Depression, rising energy prices will trigger a deeper slump in consumer spending; rising mortgage rates will snuff out a nascent recovery in the US housing market; and, with corporate profits set to slide, equity investors will rue paying 14 times for next year’s earnings on the S&P 500, the value they assigned in the good old days of 2006.