Market Sages: The Worst Is Yet to Come
for any clowns looking in, grantham is cheney's advisor
Posted Apr 28, 2008 12:53pm EDT by Aaron Task in Investing, Newsmakers
Related: ^IXIC, ^DJIA, ^SPX, SPY, DIA, QQQQ, ^N225
Positive sentiment is on the rise on Wall Street as the market moves further away from the March lows and the S&P 500 hits the top end of its 1,270-1,400 trading range. This weekend brought bullish results from the "big money poll" in Barron's, but also some more sobering commentary from two Wall Street legends: Jeremy Grantham and Peter Bernstein.
In his latest quarterly letter, GMO founder Grantham predicts the U.S. market won't hit bottom until sometime in 2010, citing the painful experience of past post-bubble economies. "The unraveling of the 2000 bubble is a tale still being told," he writes.
Author, financial analyst, and market historian Bernstein, meanwhile, poured cold water over hopes for a V-shaped recovery in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "You don't have a high-growth exit from this, as you've had from other kinds of crises," he says. "Here, the shape of the business cycle is like an L, where it goes down and doesn't turn up. Or like a U, a flat U."
Notably, Bernstein isn't as bearish on stock as Grantham, but the message from both market legends is that Wall Street's recent flirtation with optimism is misplaced.
Then again, a lot of the folks getting excited in recent weeks have much shorter time frames in mind than the big-picture cycles Grantham and Bernstein are talking about.
finance.yahoo.com |
