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James Montier, a member of fund manager GMO’s Asset Allocation Team, examined whether we learned anything from the market declines of 2008 and early 2009. His answer is, as you would expect, not a lot. Below, is an outline of the ten lessons not learned followed by a link to the full paper. It’s a [...]

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The following is a post by Marc Chandler, head of Brown Brother Harriman’s Currency Strategy Team. For more of BBH’s currency views, visit the website here.
At our website, please find our Weekly FXView, a one page table of driving forces and capital market trends for the major currencies in the week ahead.
We still favor buying [...]

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The Pragmatic Capitalist – The Many Myths of Warren Buffett
Morgan Stanley – Global Economic Forum – Default or Inflate or…
Time to Press China on Its Exchange Rate – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com
FT Alphaville – Neil Hume – Buiter’s back
S&P May Downgrade Greece Within Month on Budget Risks – Bloomberg.com
Obama may compromise on consumer agency to [...]

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In his latest post, Edward Hugh marvels at the Spanish population’s optimism that the economy will soon turn. While they correctly judge the current situation as abysmal, for whatever reason, the Spanish believe things will turn up shortly.  More power to them.
But the Spanish aren’t the only true believers. Witness America’s own consumer confidence numbers [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
According to Spain’s Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO) the ICC-ICO (consumer confidence index) went up in January by 6.1 points from its December value and is now at its highest level since August 2009. This confidence improvement is largely due to a significant rise in the [...]

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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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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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So, it’s that time of year again when people make their year-end predictions. I’ll be running my own and critiquing my performance from last year.  Here are former bear now bull Richard Bernstein’s ten predictions for 2010.  There is a clip at the bottom from CNBC as well.
Before you pillory Bernstein for going from David [...]