The Shape of Things to Come (and Gone)
by Mick Weinstein
taken from Yahoo Finance
The start of 2008 prodded market bloggers to offer a few startling predictions for the upcoming year and look back at 2007’s machinations. The broad negative sentiment we’re currently hearing is important for all investors to note — but could also be understood as a contrarian indicator that 2008 will offer significant upsides for savvy investors.
Let’s meet back here in 12 months and see what happened.
2008: Pessimism Abounds
Wall St. Journal blogger David Gaffen notes that strategist Byron Wien had some dead-on predictions for 2007, and summarizes Wien’s largely bearish calls for 2008, including the S&P 500 index falling 10 percent and the United States suffering its worst recession since 2001.
PlanetQuant demonstrates that "anyone who made the decision to invest internationally in recent years has been well rewarded," and brings hard numbers that suggest this "golden age of global investing" will continue.
David Schrader’s grandfather believes he should be depressed about the state of global economic and political events. Yet Schrader is an optimist. Retail was weaker than expected, while the state of the housing market remains "bent, but not yet broken." Financial institutions "need transfusions" to stay alive, but the stock markets were, all-in-all, positive. Schrader’s hoping that the lesson of 2007 is that "things may be better than they seem."
2008 Resources for:
bad credit credit cards
secured credit cards
unsecured credit cards
