Barron's sees something in the market

Barron's fall outlook on stocks has this commentary:

Replacing duds like General Motors with more robust companies on indexes also adds roughly $7 of earnings per share to S&P operating profits. Thanks to such changes, the S&P's book value per share has increased $40 from the market bottom, to about $495 -- and could rise further as profits swell...

That was profound--you only had that statement here three months ago:

So why should General Motors reduce the earnings in the S&P 500 in the first quarter by $6 billion when it only has a $500 million market cap?

or here:

Now let's take another look at the S&P and funky math. Didn't AAPL make $1.2 billion for the latest quarter? A few hundred million for Amazon? A half a billion for RIMM? $1.6 billion for GOOG? $3.5 billion between them? Now let's throw in GM's quarter. They lost $6 billion. OMG--The PE on these combined companies is infinity! They're losing money!! The sky is falling! The S&P is heading down! Once again, that will be a cold day in hell!

Barron's then has this to say:

The group forecasts S&P 500 companies will earn a weighted average of $72 a share next year.

Now that is fine and dandy to put that in print now, after we have had over a 50% rally. Where were they before the rally? That's right. They were bearish.

And now we have analyst targets right around 1050ish or so, and Barron's pretends these were their numbers.

Here's what the "Big Money" actually had for year-end targets for 2009, and then for June 2010

DJIA------ 8676----- 9488
S&P 500-- 906----- 1003
NASDAQ-- 1684---- 1841

Once again, we have "Who wants to be a millionaire" math on Wall Street!

Despite what the carnival barkers at barron's says!