anybody heard of "quantitative easing"

It seems illogical for a market to move up at the start of a recession. IMO this rally is entirely due to the dollar sinking. In times like this the answer to the question as to where to put your money is "anywhere except the US dollar". When you read this you will see why...

WASHINGTON — Having printed more than $1 trillion in new money since September, yet still failing to stop the economy from sinking, the Federal Reserve is expected to enter a new era of cheap money this week.

On Tuesday, policy makers are expected to lower their target for the overnight federal funds rate to 0.5 percent, a record low.

In itself, analysts said, the move will be anticlimactic. Because demand for interbank loans has been so low, the actual Fed rate has been close to zero for a month. The real change will be in how the Fed tries to fight the recession from here on.

The Fed must now turn to an approach called "quantitative easing," because it involves injecting money into the economy rather than aiming at an interest rate. The Fed has almost no experience with this approach.

"This is a whole new world," said Richard Berner, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. "You don’t have a whole lot of historical precedent for knowing how this is going to work and what the unintended consequences could be."

Indeed, the Japanese central bank used quantitative easing for years when Japan was mired in chronic price deflation and had reduced its benchmark interest rate to zero. The results were not good, and it took Japan nearly a decade to break out of the quagmire it put itself in.