Tundra, I am sorry about the confusion, but it has to be taken in conjunction with some of the "Armagedon" scenarios floating around and my general view of the market over the next 5 to seven years.
About 18 months ago, I was quite bullish on the market and had no problems seeing 15,000 on the DOW over the (then) next five years. The reasons for that bullishness was what I then believed would be the addition to the world middle class of some 300 to 500 MM people from now developing countries. I still think that that will eventually happen, but the time horizons must be lengthened due to the major dislocations that have occurred in those developing markets.
I know think that our markets are going to go into a "holding pattern" very similar to the period of 1966 to 1982 (where we were, roughly, between 500 and 1000 on the Dow) and may have few bulls followed by bear periods (three, four?), where our markets will be bound between roughly 5000 to 10,000. I do not know if you should call this a "bullish stand", it is bullish (except for a retrenchment for the next week or two) short term, till early next year.
By the way, the number 5000 is really a very rough number with its only basis in the parallel to the prior period. A more refined number for the low of the historical period is 575, so you may want to take 5750 as the low in any one of the coming bear periods, personally, I have 6200 as that low, but history never repeat itself exactly.
As for AG, you must ask yourself what is his function and is he discharging this function correctly? You can go into a lengthy debate of the constitutional basis of the Federal Reserve system and we will never end this discussion, so from a pragmatic point of view, I see his responsibilities to maintain a monetary stance that balances economic growth (as uninterrupted as feasible in a capitalistic system) with minimal fluctuations (not too much inflation nor deflation) in the monetary system. So far, IMHO, he has managed to do that quite well, despite the fact that in the rest of the world great excess of productive capacity are in place threatening the stability of the economic system. He has limited "tools" to do his job since he has no control over the fiscal side of the equation, but apparently, he has managed to work with the administration to keep what could have been violent gyrations in the markets (and then in the economy) to relatively tame fluctuations.
Zeev
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