No POV here. Just polling to see if we're anywhere near the contrarian's ratio. Comments welcome, of course.
Just keeping this thing visible. There's a lot of expertise here on ET; if we can get a hundred or so votes we'll have a meaningful indication of experts' sentiment.
So far, according to the contrarian 75/25 formula, the numbers indicate a no-crash - but we need more votes.
Just saw the results. Crazy. I must be living in a different world. I voted no crash, of course. Unless Bernanke or Trichet does something terminally stupid. Trichet is more likely to, but one hopes he learns something from how Bernanke's been handling this so far.
The old joke: If you're attending an economics lecture and you understand the professor, you're not paying attention. I don't know awfully much about economics and I doubt that anybody knows enough about economics to be truly capable of making informed macroeconomic predictions, but it seems to me with this global economy setup it may not be necessary for the screwup to come from someone of the status of a Bernanke or a Trichet; World War 1 was started by a student, Gavrilo Princip, the kid who shot Archduke Ferdinand. My point here is that big things can be triggered by little people ( not that the house comes down when some little somebody shoots Bernanke or Trichet ).
You're a bright guy. Point well taken. The first domino in the 1930's banking debacle was Credit-Anstalt. Seventy years later a group of Detroit blacks crapping out on 75k sub-prime loans has rippled up and caused every credit spread in the world to price in additional risk. Many have compared this environment to 1998. The parallels are obvious. After Greenspan's rate cut late in the trading session on 10/15/98 the market rallied for months. In fact the prices that October weren't seen again until September of 2001. If I detect overly negative sentiment going forward I'll be accepting of that 1998 fractal continuing. My head tells me this could be different though. More 1937 than not. LTCM only rippled through the banking world. These ramifications will rip through the consumer. American's have gravitated from stocks to real estate since 2001. Hence what's bad for home prices is bad for America......