While driving back from Lake Tahoe last weekend, I received a call from a dear friend who was in a very foul mood.

Following the advice of another newsletter that I won’t mention, he bailed out of all his stocks on the February 9 meltdown. He was promised that Armageddon was coming, and the Dow would hit 3,000.

Despite the Federal Reserve now on a rate rising path, here we are with the major stock indexes just short of all-time highs.

Why the hell are stocks still going up?

I paused for a moment as a kid driving a souped-up Honda weaved into my lane of Interstate 80, cutting me off. Then I gave my friend my response, which I summarize below:

1) There is nothing else to buy. Complain all you want, but US equities are now one of the world’s highest yielding securities, with a lofty 2.5% dividend.

A staggering 50% of S&P 500 stocks now yield more than US Treasury bonds (TLT). That compares to two thirds of all developed world debt offering negative rates and US Treasuries at 2.85%.

2) Oil prices have bottomed, but remain historically low, and the windfall cost savings are only just being felt around the world.

3) While a low Euro (FXE) if definitely eating into large multinational earnings, we are probably approaching the end of the move. The cure for a weak euro is a weak euro. The worst may be behind for US exporters.

4) What follows a collapse in European economic growth? A European recovery, powered by a weak currency. European quantitative easing is working.

5) What follows a Japanese economic collapse? A recovery there, too, as hyper accelerating QE feeds into the main economy. Japanese stocks are now among the world’s cheapest. The Japanese yen (FXY ) will probably FALL for the rest of the year, adding more fuel to the fire there.

6) While the next move in interest rates will certainly be up, it is not going to move the needle on corporate P&L’s for a very long time. We might see two 25 basis point hikes, and that probably won’t happen until the second half of 2017. In a deflationary world, there is no room for more.

This will make absolutely no difference to the large number of high-growth corporates, such as technology firms that don’t borrow at all because they have enormous cash flows.

7) Technology everywhere is accelerating at an immeasurable pace, causing profits to do likewise. You see this in the FANG stocks, where blockbuster earnings reports are becoming as reliable as free upgrades.

Biotech has been on a tear as well.

See the new Alzheimer’s cure? It involves extracting the cells from the brains of alert 95-year olds, cloning them, and then injecting them into early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. I’ve already put myself on the waiting list

The success rate has been 70%. That one alone could be worth $5 billion. I might be a user of this cure myself someday.

8) US companies are still massive buyers of their own stock, and a relaxed repatriation tax law is pouring gasoline on the fire.

This has created a free put option for investors for the most aggressive companies, such as Apple (AAPL), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), and Intel (INTC), the top five repurchasers.

They have nothing else to buy either. (AIG) has mandated the repurchase of an amazing 25% of its outstanding float.

It is jacking up dividend payouts at a frenetic pace as well and are expected to return more than $700 billion in payouts this year.

9) Ignore this at your peril, but there is a global synchronized economic recovery going on which has been in the works for some years. A decade of central bank monetary stimulus and government fiscal stimulus is bearing some fruit.

10) Ditto for the banks, which were dragged down by falling interest rates for most of the last decade. Reverse that trade this year, and you have another major impetus to drive stock indexes higher.

My friend was somewhat set back, dazzled, and nonplussed by my out of consensus comments.

With that, I told my friend I had to hang up, as another kid driving a souped-up Shelby Cobra GT 500, obviously stolen, was weaving back and forth in front of me requiring my attention.

Where is a cop when you need one?