Author: Wall Street Vibes

This post was originally published on this siteAs stocks have grown increasingly volatile over the last several sessions, I keep hearing variations of an age-old question: “Is this just a correction in an ongoing bull market or the start of a new bear market?” This is exactly what the pundits on CNBC and Fox Business love to have teed up for them. (That’s why I quit doing those shows years ago.) It allows them to yak about the economy, interest rates, corporate earnings, commodity prices, political developments, Fed policy and all sorts of arcane market data from cyclically adjusted earnings to short interest to advance-decline ratios. Yet their answers are mostly nonsense, including the ones that – with the luxury of hindsight – turn out to be right. Put a dozen meteorologists in a room and ask them whether we’ll get rain or sunshine three weeks from Tuesday, and they’ll gladly concede that it isn’t possible to know. But ask a dozen stock market prognosticators what lies just ahead for stocks and they will furrow their brows, roll out their charts, and tell you to expect unseasonably warm weather with a smattering of clouds and a 20% chance of precipitation. They are paid to make short-term market predictions. And so they do. The real problem is the question itself. There’s no good answer to “What do you think the...

This post was originally published on this site “A forecast is never so useful as when it warns man of a crisis.” – Bertrand de Jouvenal “Today, the governments of the world are just creating ever increasing deficits. They are spending like there is no tomorrow… The world’s economy is being run as a giant Ponzi scheme… The ‘mother’ of all financial collapses is upon us NOW.” – 2012 promotional copy for Harry Browne’s You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis (updated) Like the hurricane that ripped through Florida, a black bear ran through Wall Street at a fast and furious pace last week, erasing any yearly gains for the indexes. There was talk of another Halloween scare in October, but fortunately the markets stabilized on Friday and Monday. The sell-off on Wall Street – and the rally in gold – reminded me of all the predictions made over the years by the permabears. For example… Financial guru Harry Browne died in 2006, but the publisher reissued his 1974 best-seller You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis in 2012, warning that we were about to suffer from the mother of all bear markets. Actually, just the opposite happened, and we have enjoyed the mother of all bull markets. In 1989, Browne wrote The Economic Time Bomb: How You Can Profit from the Emerging Crises, in which he predicted that...