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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 [...]

Bill Gross, the man who controls the largest bond fund in the world, believes that trillions of dollars in government spending will be necessary to get the economy going again. He warns that if the government does not spend trillions of stimulus to boost the economy, the U.S. and global economies could collapse.
Now, on [...]

Marc Faber thinks it would better to nationalize the banks rather than bail them out. In his view, we are seeing special interests feeding at the trough.

Wading into the controversy surrounding Peter Schiff’s investment under-performance, the Wall Street Journal has released an article which calls into question the fundamental arguments for Schiff’s investment strategy. Schiff, a fund manager often seen on television, has significantly underperformed the rest of the U.S. stock market, which itself saw a drop of nearly 40% last year. The question is why. Judging from the Journal piece his approach was aggressive and ill-timed. To my mind, this calls into question whether these losses can ever be recouped down the line. I have highlighted in bold the salient points of the article below.

Government policy must be well-crafted in order to avoid negative unintended consequences that arise when the government inserts itself into the private sector. And this is where I am having a problem with the Obama Administration.

Recently, Tim Geithner’s comments about currency manipulation put me over the top; I felt compelled to give you my seven reasons to be skeptical about the policy course now being charted.