In the time-honored Greek myth Pandora, blessed by the gods with abundant beauty and talent but also an overweening curiosity, opens the box and allows all the Ills to pour out into the world. In her despair Pandora quickly shuts the box but by then there is just one thing left inside – Hope.

Hope was in abundant supply today as well as the shares of Internet music company Pandora came streaming into the public securities markets with opening day gains in the neighborhood of 62%. But it is probably going to take more than a wing and a prayer to make it unscathed through the buzzsaw environment of the market these days. Sharing the headlines with Pandora today were the “Zombie Consumers” – a rather stark portrayal by longtime Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach of the bleak landscape of US consumer spending in the age of subpar growth, sticky unemployment and debt as far as the eye can see. With the exception of Pandora-mania risk markets today are decisively buying into the Living Dead point of view – the S&P 500 is flirting with its 200 day moving average and testing the 2011 low of 1256 reached on March 16.

Correction territory? Not quite – as of the writing of this sentence the index is trading around 1263, which puts it at 7.2% below the recent high of 1361 attained at the beginning of May. A technical correction requires a downward move of 10% – but that is hardly out of reach given the trading patterns of the past several weeks. “Sell in May and go away” is ringing true as we head into the summer months.

This seems to be the Yogi Berra of summers – “déjà vu all over again”. Greek protesters in the streets of Athens, an internecine war of words between German policymakers and their counterparts elsewhere in the EU, fears of a US double-dip recession consuming bits and bytes of media real estate. No wonder markets got all in a snit last week upon hearing that the Fed has no apparent plans in its head for a quick fix of QE3 to keep the adrenaline rush going. Investors clamoring for more stimulus have a point – if fundamental conditions today are in many important ways little changed from where they were a year ago, then how has the calculus changed away from the need for another round of intervention?

Perhaps it is time for the Fed to take the morphine away and let the natural healing process take effect. Quantitative easing, like any monetary policy, can be at least somewhat effective when applied in measured doses. But it does not make the organic problem go away. The “organic problem” in question here is the fundamentally changed socio-economic conditions of the centers of the developed world economy – the US, the Eurozone and Japan. Each of these centers faces deep-seated challenges to its health unlike any that we have seen since the second half of the 20th century. It is well and good to say that growth engines like China, India and Brazil can pick up the slack and keep global growth humming along, but in reality the fates of the developed and emerging worlds are intertwined. We believe that countries and markets will find their footing – that is the case more often than it is not – but consumer zombies and other unsavory denizens of the night will likely be an ongoing part of the landscape.