Excerpt from an interview with the great Jim Glassman:
So, ten years ago you predicted the Dow would reach 36,000. This week, the Dow fell to its lowest level since 1997, and 6,000 seems more likely than 36,000. On behalf of investors and readers everywhere: What happened?
I think that people who read my columns would consider me a level-headed person who doesn’t get upset, either way, doesn’t have tremendous enthusiasms…..The second point was that based on our calculations, we believed that stocks would rise to roughly 36,000. We said in the book that it is impossible to predict how long it will take for the market to recognize that Dow 36,000 is perfectly reasonable, but then, of course, we did take a guess
You said three to five years
[….]Would you be willing to hazard a guess on where the market will be three to five years from now?
No, and I think if there was a mistake in “Dow 36,000,” it was that we in that one sentence did hazard a guess. We sort of said two different things: It’s impossible to predict when this is going to happen, and then we said, well, we’ll predict it, anyway.
[…..]But you don’t feel the need to apologize to someone that read your book, went in and got creamed?
Absolutely not.
With financial columnists like Glassman and financial talking heads like Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli, it’s no wonder we’re facing the worst depression in 70 years.
4tehlulz
I hope these people understand how lucky they are to be American; in a lot of places, they would be light pole decorations.
Make7
Um… we said 3 2 5 years… three hundred and twenty five years. Our editor fucked it up.
jon
Other highlights of the interview:
Do you think it unfair that a mob with the pitchforks and torches burned down your home and raped and killed your family, including your dog?
Not at all. The market always bats last.
Why are you dressed as a peasant woman and standing in a field of rice in Southeast Asia?
Are you recording this?
Atanarjuat
It’s easy to find scapegoats when things take a turn for the worse. It also takes no great intellect to beat up people who, at least, showed some optimism and tried to energize the markets.
In the end, hindsight is 20/20.
-A
DougJ
Good stuff. You’re getting a lot better.
TheFountainHead
It also takes no great intellect to be a hapless cheerleader of forces you don’t understand.
But Doug is right, you’re definitely getting better.
joe from Lowell
I think that people who read my columns would consider me a level-headed person who doesn’t get upset, either way, doesn’t have tremendous enthusiasms… James K Glassman, March 2009
Before the war, they [anti-war protesters] told us that 500,000 Iraqis would be killed in Dresden-like bombing, that we would precipitate an eco-catastrophe by pushing Saddam to set fire to his oil wells, that millions of people would flee the country, that thousands of our own troops would be killed, that the Arab "street" would rise up, that terrorist attacks would resume ferociously on our homeland, that Iraqis would tenaciously resist our colonisation of their land, that we would become bogged down in urban warfare, and on and on.
In fact, none of that has happened. It has been a war unmatched in history, with relatively few civilian and allied casualties and the prime objectives – control of the capital and the destruction of Saddam’s regime – achieved in only a few weeks. James K Glassman, April 2003
Dennis-SGMM
Glassman meant 36,000 cents.
MattF
If you go back to the reviews of Glassman’s book, you’ll see that in fact everybody knew, even then, that his calculations were just stupid and wrong. The, um, interesting thing to draw from the new interview is that Glassman still doesn’t know any economics, still doesn’t understand stock valuation, and is still selling himself as the hottest shit on the market.
thomas
Puleeze, that’s Jim Cramit, not Jim Cramer.
RSA
"What is this human emotion, shame?"
Dexter Morgan
@Atanarjuat:
That what meant as satire, right?!
Zoogz
The Fountainhead @8:
Wingnut welfare queen at his finest. He’s doing nothing more than carnival barking, inviting everyone to take three baseballs to try to hit the bottles artfully screwed to the table.
After a few tosses, you’ll feel artfully screwed too.
ABS
Gotta check out the Amazon reviews for this POS:
also this was great:
Customers Associate with This Product( What’s this?)
epic fail (22)
wrong (7)
miserable failure (6)
paid shill (6)
snake-oil salesman (6)
recession (5)
fail (3)
failure (2)
fraud (2)>
Dungheap
Hilarious:
Maybe?
Peter J
He clearly meant 3600
0.He should blame his editor. I’m gussing that editor now works for Kristol and Will.
dmsilev
I hope that our fearless hero took his own advice, and invested every cent he owned in Bear Stearns stock.
-dms
Emma Anne
@joe from Lowell:
Ugh. I guess I could make a joke about how we didn’t say we knew *when* all that would happen. But it doesn’t seem very funny.
Cris
"In that one sentence." Oh, also, in the title of the book. Just those two places.
b-psycho
The zero key got stuck.
Joshua Hueco
I think that was 36,000 Zimbabwean dollars.
someguy
Along with most of our bankers and corporate executives.
That’s may not be a bad course to follow, depending on how bad everybody’s 401(k)s get.
Warren Terra
Krugman, years ago when the Dow seemed stable at 11-12k, but after the Tech Crash of 1999, had a line mocking Glassman in which he suggested that Glassman was right but had inadvertently inserted an extra digit – and that we should all fervently hope the extra digit was the 3 or a 0, and not the 6.
Krugman’s line was a lot funnier when the Dow wasn’t nearing 6000, possibly on the way further down.
Ash Can
The last finance talker I saw on TV who seemed to have any idea at all what he was doing was Louis Rukeyser. He seemed willing to do actual research on the forces moving the markets, he never took things too seriously, and he never raised his voice. And I don’t recall ever, ever hearing political commentary on his program. In contrast, I see the current-day flailers and figure there’s nothing wrong with them that a piece of duct tape across the mouth and a shove out the back door can’t fix.
Kyle
Listening to the screamers on CNBC is the fastest way to lose your money. It’s all about selling ads and entertainment, bells and whistles and shiny lights, not sound financial advice.
I can only imagine the level of bullshit on the Fox Business Channel, which was created because Murdoch’s rightards thought CNBC wasn’t pollyanna-positive enough about the business world. It will perform the public service of fleecing the stupidest of wingnuts.
Good investing is usually dull and involves assets that are low-priced and unpopular, not the sexy go-go stocks you can brag about at dinner parties. If you want excitement, go play the penny slots at the casino.
Mike G
Dow 36000Typo.
Dow $6000
Corner Stone
@Ash Can
Louis-freakin-Rukeyser fer Dog’s sake??!eleven!
The guy was a complete narcissist asshole! And a complete right wing tool!
But hey, it takes all kinds I guess.
Mongo
What a jerk.
Can’t even own up to his own BS
It’s open enrollment time for my company’s 401K.
Not one increase in contribution. Most are getting out completely.
Matt
You know, I had somehow managed to avoid seeing the video of Santelli’s little snit-fit until The Daily Show ran it. Now I want to kick Santelli in the throat.
Does that make me a bad person?
Brian J
No, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Commentators aren’t angry so much with people like Santelli and others on CNBC because they supposedly give bad advice, but because they had a pretty big role in our current mess and are trying to act like any sort of help for those who aren’t involved in high finance but just trying to survive is outrageous. He was an asshole for that little tirade, and he deserved to be called on it.
ET
Since when is Glassman a financial analyst? Seriously. I know he wrote that stupid book but before that he was running the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call (not a financial paper) and prior to that he ran a small paper (Figaro) in New Orleans (again not a financial paper) as well as a few other publications. None of that experience would make think that he would write a financial book people would glom onto and actually take seriously.
Egilsson
Actually, Glassman meant "Down 36000".
Gay immigrant copy editors messed it up.
r€nato
Remember that Asian guy in Canada who, out of the blue, attacked a fellow bus passenger with a knife, dismembered him and ate the parts?
Yeah. I wish the passenger had been Santelli.
And that Travis the chimp had had first crack at him as well.
r€nato
With this track record of gross incompetence, you just know there’s one place where Glassman was sure to find work:
r€nato
…I will say one positive thing about Glassman, he only stole the money of people who bought his book. As far as I know, he’s not responsible for making or enabling toxic mortgage loans, CDS, or CDO.
r€nato
Someday I’m going to be worth $10 billion, have a 14" cock with the girth of a beer can, and supermodels will accompany me wherever I go.
It is impossible to predict how long it will take for this to happen, but then of course, I am just taking a guess.
r€nato
@Matt:
a) No.
b) No, but you’ll have to take a number and wait your turn.
c) No. Your restraint is quite admirable. I’d curb-stomp the fucker and then find a chimp to rip his face off.
Tax Analyst
Those are some rather telling associations. They oughta be reprinted on the dust jacket to his book.
Ash Can
@Corner Stone: Oh, he was smug, all right. But he wasn’t stupid or ill-informed, like today’s TV assholes are. And if some corporate executive did something boneheaded, he wasn’t afraid to light the guy up. Taken as part of the whole package, I could handle the smugness.
Grace Nearing
@TheFountainHead:
Fair enough, but it does take some skill to be a well-paid cheerleader of forces you don’t understand.
Shiva
The problem is that these financial wizards have nothing to lose by being wrong. If their bet pays off, they keep the money. If they make a mistake, the taxpayers pay for it. But it’s hard to blame these people when the government basically gave them a green light. This seems to have been a problem well before George W. Bush, although Bush’s adding $5 trillion to the national debt surely made things worse. But I remember a hedge fund problem back in the 1990’s. The government must have been aware that all kinds of crazy leveraged deals were being made. So with no "adult supervision" on the part of the government, it’s hard to blame people in the private sector from going crazy on leverage.
freelunch
You know, I had somehow managed to avoid seeing the video of Santelli’s little snit-fit until The Daily Show ran it.
But, like the movies celebrated in MST3K, it’s so much better when you see it with a friend — or just a master of mockery.
Do you think that Santelli expected people to find out that his tea stunt was already set up?
nylund
Delong has a good post somewhere (can’t find it) where he spells out pretty clearly all the numerous ways Glassman totally messed up his math by double-counting a lot of key numbers.
It becomes clear that Glassman obviously had no understanding of the math he was using, and not surprisingly, his faulty math spit out a pretty crazy number. Basically, the book is what results when someone reads a couple papers and gets a rudimentary understanding of a subject and then insists he knows more than the experts who’ve dedicated years to the subject. (we still see this problem wrt* evolution, global warming, etc.)
If I remember, the Delong post was in regard to some speaking engagement where both were scheduled to speak, but Glassman withdrew because he didn’t want to be in the same room as Brad given how stupid DeLong made him look by pointing out all the errors in his math. (in case anyone wants to try to google it).
(*PS. is "wrt" a common acronym? or do I just do way too much calculus as part of my everyday life?)
billmon
The fact that James Glassman still has a career in Washington — and still find his views semi-respectably solicited by the Washington Post — says a lot about why we are fast descending towards Dow 6,000.
We’re talking late Soviet levels of decadence and decay.
memory bank
Yes, billmon. The Republicans remind me of Soviet Communist Party members who still clung to their ideology after the collapse of their system.