Archive for September, 2012
David Darst: Should You Trust the U.S. Financial Markets?
Is the cult of equity dying, as bond king Bill Gross recently opined in his monthly investment outlook? Gross runs the world’s largest and one of its most successful bond funds, the PIMCO Total Return Fund and is one of the country’s most influential investors and prognosticators. As Gross’ chart, “Stocks For The Really Long Run” shows, stocks, with their 6.6% annualized inflation adjusted returns, have vastly outperformed bonds and cash over the last one hundred years; a fact chronicled by Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel in his investment classic, Stocks For The Long Run. Gross maintains this track record is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is PIMCO’s expectation that the economy will grow at a much slower pace for the foreseeable future. Under PIMCO’s now famous “new normal” forecast, real GDP should crawl along at 1-2% a year versus the historical average of 3.5% in the post-war era.
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CONSIDER HIGH QUALITY EUROPEAN STOCKS
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Mutual European Z (MEURX)
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SARGEN & LIPSKY: THE DECLINE OF U.S. FINANCIAL DOMINANCE
The Decline of U.S. Financial Dominance
The Effectiveness or Lack Thereof of Federal Reserve’s Monetary Policy
It has been four years since the start of the worst financial crisis in the post war era. It feels like a lifetime to me. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, tipping the world into a systemic financial meltdown which we have been recovering from ever since. It’s helpful to step back every once and while and see how far we have come since the market lows of March 2009, when the S&P closed under 700. It has more than doubled since then, but oh what a ride it has been!
Read MoreOne of this week’s guests, Fort Washington Investments Nick Sargen, points out that there have been three distinct market phases since the financial crisis began. First, “the sell off” from September of ‘08 to March of ‘09 when global credit markets froze, economies fell into recession, and the Fed drove interest rates to zero. During the sell-off, the S&P lost 46%, other markets plummeted; U.S. Treasuries and gold were the only major asset classes to gain.
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