Thoughts on What's Ahead

In "Will Stocks' 'Lost Decade' Usher In Another Bull Market?" USA Today's Adam Shell polled a group of marketwatchers -- including Sam Stovall, S&P's chief strategist; Bob Doll, Global chief investment officer of equities at BlackRock; Jeremy Siegel, a finance professor at the Wharton School of business and author of Stocks for the Long Run; Jeff Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial; Francis Kinniry, a principal at Vanguard's Investment Strategy Group; Jim Paulsen, a strategist at Wells Capital Management; Tony Crescenzi, strategist and portfolio manager at Pimco; Axel Merk, president and chief investment officer of Merk Mutual Funds; Michael Farr, manager of the Touchstone Capital Appreciation fund; and, yours truly -- about what to expect in the period ahead,

Here's what I had to say:

Investors who see much better returns ahead are making the same mistake as those who expect a V-shaped recovery, says Michael Panzner, who writes a blog, Financial Armageddon, and is the author of When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the American Era.

"They fail to grasp that the crisis-led downturn was not a cyclical event, but the first stage of a secular recalibration," he says.

Panzner believes the causes of stocks' poor performance in the 2000s — the bursting of the housing bubble, an economy built on debt and an easy money policy from the nation's central bank — have yet to be resolved.

Stocks, he argues, are still trading far above the single-digit P-Es that have kicked off sustainable bull markets in the past.

Panzner's biggest worry is "a hostile interest rate environment." The need for governments here and abroad to borrow trillions of dollars to fund deficits will push rates sharply higher. "The higher rates will inflict a lot of damage on the still vulnerable real estate sector and corporate bottom lines," he says.

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Comments

[Matt]

Apparently the stock market is fixed (Sarcasm)

[slingshot]

Nancy Pelosi forced states to accept bailout money? Or is that just canned fatuity you had to litter an otherwise informative article with?