The following is my recent argument with yet one more market analyst who can’t see straight, even when his article overall was admitting it was time to bail out of stocks. Correcting the market mantras that dominate the bullheaded is partly why I am here.
I’m not going to call this one out of the herd by name because sometimes his writing is sensible. It is the group-think herd mentality of the bulls, which he expresses, that I am challenging. His writing is in quotes and my responses to his way of thinking follow each quote.
I lay it out here because somehow it still surprises me to see how vapid the wasteland of popular thought can be even when analysts finally reach the point of giving up on stocks. I actually sometimes enjoy reading this author, but this article demonstrates the typical delirious thinking that pervades market commentary everywhere all the time in what is a virtual desert of economic analysis. So, I’m going to dissect it for you as an example of just how full of denial so much market commentary is:
Just when we thought all the pieces of puzzle were coming together to take the S&P 500 … significantly higher, a crucial element of the puzzle fell out of place. Yes, I’m talking about the escalation of the U.S./China Trade War….
I don’t know who the “we” is, but it certainly wasn’t me. I cannot even imagine how anyonethought the US/China Trade War — or, as I call it, the Trump Trade War — was ever coming together. It could not possibly have “fallen out of place,” because it has never for one second been in place. It has been astounding to watch how people can month-after-month for over a year continue to chase the belief that the Trump Trade War is starting to fall into place (let alone “has fallen into place”) in a way that will let stock markets now prosper (after eighteen months of going almost nowhere).
Read the rest here: The Great Recession