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winner69
12-02-2007, 10:44 AM
This fella Gary Marks (author of Rocking Wall St) has a bearish view of the world ... along the lines of what Halebop is thinking?

Worth reading if only for the prose


GARY MARKS WEB NEWS

Q4 2006 - The quarter moved in a slow orderly fashion. Volatility was virtually non-existent. We have hitched a ride aboard this year’s gravy train. But how long can it last?

Everything now seems to be priced for perfection. Bonds are perfectly low, indicating inflation is under control and the Fed will lower rates soon.

On the other hand, stocks are rising, and jobless claims are falling, indicating the economy will remain strong and the Fed will remain neutral.

Housing prices are still falling nationwide while inventory grows to record levels, but this event, according to many market prognosticators, is apparently somehow a non-issue to America’s doggedly determined consumers. We have seen the lows in the housing market, sayeth the hand wringing real estate agents. All the while they are cutting their fees and offering free diamonds, cars, and trips to the moon for those buyers willing to pull the trigger.

The dollar has recently hit lows not seen in over a year against the Euro. Still, no one is panicking by any means, or even talking about the trade or budget deficits anymore. No worries, sayeth a rising stock market, too busy expanding P/E ratios to be concerned about such trifles.

As far as China and Japan are concerned, did the Bosox sign that Japanese pitcher? Ho hum. . . . If their economies slow down, that’s their problem, we’ll be fine, right?

America is muddling along in the land of status quo. The markets are rising in baby steps, calm and yawny day after calm and yawny day.

It makes for a nice picture, doesn’t it?



To Gary's Blogs -
Amazon Blog



But the picture is painted with many contrasting views. There seems to be a strange underpinning to it all that doesn’t quite add up -- like a Picasso made with those odd out-of-sync clashing cubes, rather than a Monet painted in a warm coordinate of holographic dots. Like clouds forming and darkening from the clashing of heat and cold, rather than those easy going summer-day-flying-dinosaurs made of cotton and wind in our childhood. Like a car wreck crumbling into a macabre steel gray statue on the side of the highway, rather than a tree-lined Thanksgiving drive to grandma’s house.

Maybe I’m wrong, and a soft landing made up of many conflicting economic pieces is exactly the way this picture gets put together. Maybe this bull market will last far longer than even I can ever have hoped for. Maybe the world has changed and global liquidity will cancel out inverted yield curves, and low bond yields will outweigh historically high price to earnings ratios.

Maybe I should just laugh at all the classical economists and value players pointing skyward to thunder and lightening somewhere far off in the land of Armageddon, just like I did in 1999 with the Y2K panic, and simply trust my momentum, trend following nature. Then again, lessons were learned post-1999 that were not lost on me.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

But of course, having so fastidiously learned nothing from history, most of us would now ask, “Who the hell was George Bernard Shaw?”

Maybe there is no need to worry about historical precedent. Maybe a new bull market, born of reasons never seen before, will continue to push old rationalists and value players into the dirt as it dashes merrily by like one of Santa’s reindeer, leaving the old school befuddled again, staring in wonder, like a senior citizen squinting at a car full of rappers speeding through the old town where he was born.

If you think the tone of this newsletter is a bit more bizarre than anything I’ve written before it’s because with rationality on strike I am suspending all need to be sensible and conservative in my writing approach. I am mirroring the times.

In March of 2000, I began to write about b

Steve
13-02-2007, 06:06 AM
Is Halebop really Gary Marks?!