MICHEL PIREU: Even the experts can get it wrong with dire bear predictions
Despite forecasts of a crash most markets have enjoyed one of longest bull runs on record, but the gloom did not quite go away
Did you believe those financial pundits in 2009-2010 who said it was a great time to buy? Or were you too negative to even contemplate it? If so, you were not alone. There was no shortage of dark-side input to factor into your investment equation back then. Marc Faber, author of The Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, was predicting “a big bust”, in which credit expansion would have to come to an end. Money manager Jeremy Grantham was warning that “we’d learnt nothing,” and “historical cycles coupled to our irrational behaviour” guaranteed “another, bigger global meltdown”. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz also thought nothing had changed and that it was now “all worse”. Financial historian Niall Ferguson was blaming the US Federal Reserve and saying another bubble and crash are "virtually certain, thanks to Wall Street’s insatiable greed”. Nassim Taleb, risk-management professor and author of The Black Swan, saw in former Fed chair Ben Bernanke “an economist who doesn't even know he doesn’...
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