Source... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/very-s ... 2011-11-22SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “Top advisers see very slow growth in 2012.”? That headline is screaming at Americans in “InvestmentNews: The Leading News Source for Financial Advisers”? and most trusted.
Get it? Not just “slow growth,”? but “very slow growth in 2012.”? Another even predicted “very slow, measured growth for two, three years.”? Actually it’s far worse. Folks, this is not some worried bull hyping naïve investors, not a Wall Street bank analyst, a Washington politician covering his butt, nor one of Mad Money’s market mavericks.
No, this comes from the most respected news source reporting to America’s financial advisers. These are the 100,000 professional Registered Investment Advisers who are advising Americans on managing trillions of retirement assets.
Get it? Main Street America, you should “expect very slow growth”? in 2012. That was the response when asked what “scenarios are you painting for your clients?”? The panelist at a recent InvestmentNews Round Table then added: “It’s going to be ugly and violent.”? Why? Because the politicians “are driving things”? and they are “capricious, which leads to volatility.”? And clients are “not really happy,”? but “they lived through ‘08 and ’09,”? so 2012 will be “just a little bump in the road.”?
Yes folks, “slow growth”? is another very big bump. Let’s put this is context: Wall Street’s a big fat loser. In fact, during the 2000-2010 decade, their stock market casino actually lost (yes, lost) an inflation-adjusted 20%. On a high-risk roller-coaster ride. Remember? In 2000 the DJIA was 11,722, rose and peaked at 14,164 in 2007. And today, after all the volatility, the market’s back where it was in 2000, Wall Street “flat-lined.”?
But the house always wins at Wall Street’s casino, gets rich. While America loses. Jack Bogle called Wall Street a croupier skimming a third of Main Street profits off the top. In both bull and bear markets. Not once but twice during the decade the Wall Street casino lost over 45% of your money, trillions of your retirement assets: through the dot-com crash, a 30-month recession, the credit meltdown of 2008, a recent recession, and now today a national economic disaster caused by self-destructive partisan political wars.
So don’t kid yourself folks, recent economic and market “ugliness and violence”? not only won’t end soon, it’ll get meaner and meaner for years after 2012 elections … no matter who wins. Only a fool would believe that a new bull market will take off in 2013. Ain’t going to happen. That’s a Wall Street fantasy. Fall for that, and you’re delusional.
In fact, you better plan on a very long secular bear the next decade through 2020. With the European banks, credit and currency on the edge of a global financial meltdown, there’s a high probability that a black swan virus, a contagion will sweep the world, making all investing “uglier”? and more “violent”? for Americans in 2013, indeed for the rest of the decade.
Let’s set 20`2 in the broader historical context, seen trough the lens of one of America’s most respected economists, long-time Forbes columnist Gary Shilling’s analysis of the poor performance of stocks during Wall Street’s bull/bear cycles the past 60 years, then, projecting the trend line forward till 2020.
What’s coming? Much tougher times are dead ahead, possibly even a sequel to the painful sideways bear of 1968-1982. Bottom line, don’t expect much out of stocks.
Bonds beat stocks by factor of 11-times since 1981
Listen closely to Shilling’s analysis of the past three decades. In an Insight newsletter a couple years ago he compared the performance of the S&P 500 stock index to the bond market. First he focused on his “all-time favorite graph”? comparing “the results from investing $100 in a 25-year zero-coupon Treasury bond at its yield high (and price low) in October 1981, and rolling it into another 25-year Treasury annually to maintain that 25-year maturity.”?
His bottom line: “On March 31, 2009, that $100 was worth $16,656 with a compound annual return of 20.4%. In contrast, $100 invested in the S&P 500 at its low in July 1982 was worth $1,502”? in early 2009, “for a 10.7% annual return including dividend reinvestment. So Treasurys outperformed stocks by 11.1 times.”?
But of course, Wall Street’s not going to push this “boring bonds”? alternative. Why? Wall Street can’t make big bucks in commissions. So instead, during this same three decades, Wall Street was using sales gimmicks to sell its losers to America’s 95 million vulnerable investors.
Imagine: If you were in your twenties and just out of college back in 1981, and you started adding a hundred more bucks each and every month using Shilling’s zero-coupon strategy, you’d be enjoying early retirement today, instead of crying because your retirement stocks lost so much of your money.
An interesting analysis. I agree in part. Being speculative (this is VP talk here) I am inclined to believe that we are in the early stages of a long cyclical bear market in stocks. But that's where my agreement ends. He notes the brutal bear market of the late 60's - early 80's in support of his thesis that stocks may be a poor investment. But what he ignores is that bonds also sucked during this same time frame. Bonds did not become a good buy until the early 80's when steps were finally taken to break the great inflation. I am far more inclined to see a period of highly volatile financial markets coupled with higher inflation, possibly much higher.
All of which said, I don't have enough conviction about future events at this point to be making any really speculative bets. But I have mentally accepted the possibility of employing up to 20% of my total investments in a VP if I reach the point where my gut feeling becomes much more insistent. For now, everything is in a PP.
