Fear and Emotion

I have interviewed many guests and economists over the past four months who fall into one of three camps.

1) We are in a recession

2) We are headed into a recession

3) We are living in a period of slow growth and rising inflation. Not quite stagflation but also not cause for alarm bells.

So what do you think?

Yesterday I had several meetings after the show and caught up with a couple of my former Wall Street colleagues. As I listened to one of them, I began to think, are we driving ourselves into a recession? Someone said to me yesterday that they were working out in the gym and up on the television screens above them were CNN, CNBC and FOX. He couldn't hear what was being said but he could see Bernanke testifying and what we call in the industry the lower thirds or banners (the banner at the bottom of your screen where we put what the guest is saying, the topic or the name of the guest). Every single banner read "Housing Crisis," "Mortgage Meltdown," "Slowing Growth, " "Dollar at Historic Lows," "Consumer Spending Slowed Significantly," "Considerable Stress" in the financial markets. He said he couldn't watch it anymore. It's despressing me. Are things that bad? Don't we have an economy that is almost fully employed? Isn't the weak dollar helping the current acount deficit and exports? Aren't sovereign wealth funds investing in our country and companies? Aren't we witnessing one of the best election years in history? Aren't we discovering new drugs and cures to cancer?

He's right. Like everything in life there are two ways of looking at things. You can take the glass-is-half-empty approach and you can take the glass-is-half-full approach. Are we, myself included, in the media only portraying one side of it? Is that the way to sensationalize it and draw eyeballs? Are we, in part, the reason why people are going to the polls and saying that the economy is the number one issue? Can we deliver the news, even the bad news and do it in a way that highlights both the good and bad or gives viewers options and solutions to the bad case scenario?

I think he has a point. We cannot dismiss the fact that the credit cycle managed to become one of the biggest balloons in this economy and perhaps in U.S. history. Credit was cheap, assets were mismanaged and people made too many blind investments. Housing, financial markets and growing demand for those inflation related products like oil, gas, ethanol, milk are all to blame. But now we need to reassess our financial future, make changes, adapt, take risks where necessary and in some cases, clean up the mess. And, as my friend Charles Payne would say, look at stock valuations. In many cases, the cheapest valuations that we have seen in half a decade, if not more! My guess is that the market has figured that out and that is why despite ALL of the negative headlines yesterday the market perservered.