Predictions of Doomsday

Doomsday poll: 87% risk of stock crash by year-end

Commentary: 10 predictions point to worse plunge than 2008

Paul Farrell

Marketwatch,

5 June, 2013

New crash coming? When? Before year-end?

In “Stocks for the Long Run,” economist Jeremy Siegel researched all the “big market moves” between 1801 and 2001. Bottom line: 75% of the time, there is no rationale for “big moves.” No one can predict them. Maybe technicians and traders can pick short-term moves the next second. Maybe tomorrow. But the long-term “big market moves?” No way.

So why predict an “87%” chance of another meltdown in 2013? Because in the real world of statistical probabilities, historical facts and expert opinions danger signals are flashing wild. In mid-2008 we summarized the predictions of 20 experts over several years. Predicted a meltdown in a few years — markets crashed two months later. Fast.

In retrospect, it was inevitable, thanks in part to the hype, arrogance and incompetence of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who failed to prepare America.

The warnings are again accelerating. And so is the happy talk from Wall Street casino insiders, about rallies, housing recoveries, perpetual cheap money. Don’t listen. The next crash will happen by year-end.

Yes, there’s a 13% chance the next Fed chairman will keep printing cheap money into 2014. But on New Years Eve our aging bull will be 4½ years old, well past Bill O’Neill’s “average” 3.75 years for putting this bull out to pasture.

So unless you’re shorting, all bets on Wall Street casinos for 2014 are megarisk, like 2008. Like a Stephen King horror film, you feel it coming. Could happen anytime, even tomorrow, says Siegel’s research, or the unpredictable logic in Nassim Taleb’s “Black Swan.”

Here are 10 other predictions adding credibility to a crash by the end of 2013:

1. Warren Buffett ‘guaranteed’ new bubble, new recession four years ago

Actually he saw it coming early. Shortly after the 2008 crash Warren Buffett was asked: “Do you think there will be another bubble leading to a huge recession?” Yes, “I can guarantee it.” Cycles happen.

Next question: “Why can’t we learn the lessons of the last recession? Look where greed has gotten us.” Then with the impish grin of a Zen master, Uncle Warren replied, “Greed is fun for a while. People can’t resist it.” But “however far human beings have come, we haven’t grown up emotionally at all. We remain the same.”

Yes, one of world’s richest men was personally guaranteeing another bubble, another “huge recession.” Now, four years later, that time bomb is ticking louder, closer.

2. Federal Reserve’s Council: ‘Unsustainable bubble in stocks, bonds’

The International Business Times just reported on the minutes of the Federal Reserve Board Advisory Council’s mid-May meeting. Members expressed “strong concerns over the Fed’s low-interest-rate policies and its bond-purchase program, which they say could trigger unmanageable inflation and an ‘unsustainable bubble’ in the stock and bond markets.” Some “pointed out that near-zero interest rates could not be sustained in the long run.”

Why? “A spike in inflation could force the Fed to hike interest rates, hurting business confidence and consumer spending, and prove disastrous to the U.S. economy, which is still clawing its way back from the debilitating effects of the 2008 financial crisis.”

Get it? The Fed and Wall Street insiders hear something’s dead ahead.

3. Peter Schiff is ‘doubling down’ on his ‘doomsday’ prediction

Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff, author of “The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy,” is “not backing away from doomsday predictions about the U.S. economy,” wrote MarketWatch’s Greg Robb last week. He sees the no-win scenario: “Either the Fed stops QE and starts selling the Treasurys and mortgage-related assets on its balance sheet, thus triggering a recession, or else faces an inevitable, even-worse, currency crisis.”

The “idea that the U.S. economy is in recovery is based entirely on rising asset prices ... Asset prices are only rising because rates are low. As soon as rates go back up, asset prices will” fall.