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I woke up this morning thinking about James Baker’s October 1987 comments on the dollar which many feel precipitated the 1987 crash. This was on my mind as I contemplated the implications of Obama’s recent regulatory announcement bombshell. The market has been jittery the last two days and the VIX is way up. So, 1987 [...]

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From cuddly teddy bear, to growling starving bear, here is your bear market index, courtesy of FallStreet.com. Hat tip Scott.
 

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Bond king Bill Gross has gone populist. He starts his latest monthly investment outlook with an indictment of capitalism as practiced today in the United States that is a frontal assault on the corruption we are witnessing in Washington. As more and more revelations like the Geithner AIG cover-up surface, one must wonder if America [...]

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Markets were disappointed by today’s unemployment data because they reveal how difficult it has been for the employment situation to improve in a meaningful way. The employment market is improving, just not as much as one would hope. Below are four charts derived from the household survey data that tell the story, but also point [...]

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Given the fact that I have just finished writing two articles on Wien’s predictions for 2010, I thought it relevant to look back at the last three years of Wien’s surprises to just before the housing crisis.  I posted the 2009 predictions last year. The post is here.  Wien calls these events that he gives [...]

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Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events.  So, I was eager to see his 2010 list, which was unveiled earlier today. Please read his list in the post here as background.
Reviewing 2009 predictions
When Wien [...]

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I will have some commentary on this in a future post or an updated version of this one. Update 1600 ET: you can see my commentary in the next post here.
The Surprises of 2010

The United States economy grows at a stronger than expected 5% real rate during the year and the unemployment level drops below [...]

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Robin Hanson makes this assertion in a recent post in his blog “Overcoming Bias.” I found his argument as to why this is so pretty provocative. Yesterday, I had actually linked out to an article at Science Daily on why powerful people don’t practice what they preach. The Science Daily piece pointed to research indicating [...]

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Just like last year, I am going to present the list of ten outrageous predictions from Denmark’s Saxo Bank.  When I presented the list in 2008, I gave the following disclaimer:
Their list is outlandish — and I’ll get to it in a moment. But, first, I want to say these predictions serve a very useful [...]

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John Hussman’s latest weekly contribution contends that the market is now extremely overvalued, to the point where long-term returns will likely be low.
As of last week, the S&P 500 nearly matched the richest valuations, on normalized earnings, ever observed prior to 1995. While it is quite true that valuations have been higher for the majority [...]