The S&P 500 went up 29 percent in the year gone by. The Nasdaq Composite rose nearly 40 percent. But this has prompted an argument that stock prices in 2013 were like cotton candy, lots of size, but not a lot of substance. Marketplace’s Economics guy Chris Farrell has been considering this.

The argument comes down to the idea that the gains of 2013 reflected more of the Fed’s quantitative easing rather than any real economic improvement, and that prices are bound to come tumbling back down sooner or later. But does the claim that the stock markets’ gains have no substance, hold up?

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