Good point to recount economic history, as I am a believer in it repeating itself, too. I believe your only mistake is in correlating this recession with the last two or three. This one has all the earmarks and fidelity of 1825, 1873 and 1929. They were massive credit bubbles that burst after many, many years of growth. They had multiple waves of corrections down, between which there were some strong relief rally’s.
But logic should prevail and act as a confirmation of this as well. I have a lot of trouble determining what will cause employment to rise. Or more importantly, what will cause demand to rise and get the level of profitability needed to sustain the current P/E levels that are now projected and reflected in the market prices. We essentially need to find another real estate bubble to create or other such industry for the money to flow into. But nothing seems to be coming to the surface. I actually think this was the impending scenario in 2002, but extremely cheap money ran into housing and we were off to the races. That’s all imploding now.
I stand by my thesis that the last 6 years was almost entirely a debt driven growth with little if any productivity gains or anything else of a sustainable nature. So we now must give it all back as it was not real nor sustainable. And if you count the DotCom as a bubble as well, then we need to give it back to about 1998 levels. I think this is very possible as well as an over correction to the downside as the market regains its mean.
Only time will tell, but we need another bubble and I dont see it anywhere. I think we are now stuck in reality and have to face the fact that the creation of wealth can only be sustained with innovation and gains in productivity and invention. These tend to take more time than creating bubbles.
