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.
Click here
to read the rest.