“We feel like this market still has some room to move higher,” said Burt White, chief investment officer at LPL Financial in Boston, which oversees $259 billion. “We’re still at levels that are lower than we were before Lehman Brothers. We are vastly better off than we were then.”
>
Are we really “vastly better off than we were then?” Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg (via Barron’s) looks at the details and concludes not one tiny bit:
Since Lehman, we have lost 6.2 million jobs;
The unemployment rate is 10.2% now, versus 6.2% the day before Lehman collapse;
Real gross domestic product is still down 3% since the summer of 2008;
Housing starts are down 30%;
Auto sales are down 23%;
Bank credit has contracted by $500 billion, or 8%;
Household net worth is down $7 trillion;
Home prices are down an average of 10%;
Office-vacancy rates are up 3.5 percentage points, to 17.2%;
Apartment-vacancy rates are up a percentage point to 11.1%;
Consumer confidence is down 11 points;
The budget deficit has tripled;
If this is “vastly better off,” I shudder to think what “worse off” would look like. . .
>
Source:
Long Way for Nothing
ALAN ABELSON
Barron’s NOVEMBER 23, 2009
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125875996020558221.html
What's been said:
Discussions found on the web: