Tuesday, January 06, 2009

What's going on?

Forgive me if I'm a little confused. A significant plurality of Wall Street prognosticators are falling all over themselves to issue more and more bullish pronouncements for the first and more so the second half of the year, excluding your permabears, naturally.

Meanwhile, economists, pliers of the dismal science, after all, are competing too be more and more pessimistic, and not just gloom-n-doomers like Nouriel Roubini (just back from a lovely vacation in St. Barth's with leggy socialites, to judge by Facebook), are fighting to be the most pessimistic, witness Paul Krugman's frightfest on the Time op-ed page yesterday trying to bully Republicans into supporting Obama's aggressive government spending plan.*

So who's a girl to believe? Hard to say. But I can say that, anecdotally, I'm hearing about people getting jobs without looking for them. I see people I know looking to hire. I see some vendors being too busy to get a meeting with them.

Mark Hulbert's Wednesday piece on the bearishness of too much bullishness feels right, incidentally.

*Earth to Krugman, Nobel or no, the Right has been reading your op-ed work for years and are pointedly not listening. Get a co-signer from Chicago next time

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