Is the U.S. stock market close to bottoming?

After another brutal day in the market, whether the market is bottoming does not seem like the question on most people’s minds. Ten stocks declined for every one up today — and on heavy volume. Retail investors are clearly switching into cash and bonds judging from the recent price action. Yet, an increasing number of long-time bears are becoming ever more bullish as the market declines. Witness famous investor Steven Leuthold

Fleckenstein: Protect yourself from Financial Armageddon with gold

Bill Fleckenstein is a well-known money manager and write over at MSN Money. He has been fairly bearish on the medium-term outlook for U.S. equities and technology stocks in particular for some time. His viewpoint stems from what he sees as a reckless monetary policy. Witness his book, “Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve.”

Jeremy Grantham: “Pull the trigger”

In a Fortune article about how the market is hitting new lows, Jeremy Grantham predicted we will see a material new low. He’s talking about 600, or mind you, 450 on the S&P 500. Now, that’s low.

Nevertheless, he’s fairly bullish here

Jamie Galbraith: Stimulus not enough

James Galbraith, a well-known professor at the University of Texas-Austin has joined Paul Krugman in declaring Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan too small. Below is a video from the Wall Street Journal explaining why the stimulus is not enough and what needs to be done with the banking plan

Michael Panzner: Financial Armageddon?

Fellow econblogger Michael Panzner of Financial Armageddon was on Bloomberg TV and radio today telling folks what all of this credit crisis, bear market, nationalization stuff really means for globalization, the U.S. and stocks.  He recently wrote a book on this very topic called “When Giants Fall.” He is not at all upbeat about the

Nationalization talk everywhere

Everybody is talking about nationalization. The latest trigger is the Citi discussions with the U.S. government to convert taxpayers’ preferred shares into common equity.

Below are a few Bloomberg video clips from just this morning where experts including Marc Faber, Peter Hahn and Bloomberg’s Tom Keene talk about nationalization. It is a very controversial issue. Hopefully, these clips will give you different viewpoints on the subject

Robert Shiller: “It’s not likely to be quickly over”

Three views of the global economy

Today’s Globe & Mail does an excellent job of presenting the three different potential outcomes for the global economy, one optimistic, one pessimistic and a third somewhere in between. Below are the key snippets of their article reflecting each of the three outcomes. However, I highly recommend reading the full article which is linked below

Paul Krugman on the global economy

Below is a clip from the World Affairs Council meeting in Oregon with Paul Krugman as keynote speaker. The clip runs 1 hour and 34 minutes. However, Krugman’s piece, which is the centerpiece starts at about 13 minutes. And runs through his ideas first before they open it up to questions. Well worth a look

World Economic Forum: Experts voice their views on the economy

Below is a good video clip from the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. The speakers are addressing the issue of how they see the global economic outlook going forward. The moderator who begins the discussion is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, who I quoted in a recent post.

This clip comes in at one hour in length, but is definitely worth a watch because it gives you a good sense of what some very smart, very well-connected people believe. You should note that Martin Wolf himself does not believe the Obama bailout package is going to get it done

Some tidbits about stimulus, recovery, and the Great Depression

Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust is one of the few economists to have warned about the present economic malaise. So his analysis of present events carries weight. In making recommendations about our future economic path, Kasriel leans heavily on historic precedent regarding periods of deleveraging, one such period being the Great Depression. He draws some interesting conclusions

Roubini: Even 2010 will feel like a recession

Nouriel Roubini, nicknamed Dr. Doom by the media for his accurate but downbeat calls on the economy, is not presenting a very upbeat scenario here. He says that even if everything goes well, growth in 2010 will be very poor. It will feel like a recession. The Bloomberg journalist interviewing him in this video is