New doomsday poll: 99.9% risk of 2014 crash

Global risks are accelerating. This is our fourth major poll update of industry leaders: A critical review of their warnings from early last year when we first predicted a 87% risk of a crash: Bernanke’s Fed saw an “unsustainable bubble” ... Gross: “credit supernova” ... Gundlach: “kaboom ahead” ... Ellis: “Don’t own bonds” ... Shilling: “shocker” ... Roubini: “Prepare for perfect storm” ... Shiller: “Irrational exuberance is back” ... Schiff: “Doubling down” on “doomsday” prediction ... InvestmentNews’ warning 90,000 advisers: “tick, tick ... boom!”

The Fed will keep the easy-money printing presses rolling.

A few weeks later the crash risk was up to 98%. Then a dramatic preholiday uptick in investor sentiment. America’s collective unconscious tired of negativity after a Halloween headline: “Economic guillotine dead ahead.” A week later, 2014 became the “Year of the Boom.” Bank of America’s chief strategist screamed: “Bet on the bulls now.” The Great Gatsby spirit was celebrating the holidays: “Even old grumpy Dr. Doom, celeb economist Nouriel Roubini, began humming a happy tune all over television: “A global recovery is going to occur, get into equities.”

What really happened? Fed politics. Short-term, Larry Summers withdrew as a candidate for the Fed chairman’s job. Dark cloud lifted as Janet Yellen become the pick. Wall Street cheered, Bernanke’s easy-money printing presses would not screw up their year-end bonuses. Plus Main Street was mentally exhausted, tired of the bad news, relentless political drama. We needed a holiday break.

By Thanksgiving, “irrational exuberance” was accelerating in full holiday tilt: Headline: “Shiller’s hot P/Es will power a roaring bull till 2017,” and 2014 got branded the “Katy Perry market!” A week later, a Thanksgiving headline added: “10 reasons to be a bull in 2014.”

But long term? What’s really ahead for America in 2014? Warning, something bigger is hiding in the deep shadows of our collective brain. At a recent lunch with an old friend, one of the world’s more successful commodities traders, he confirmed that “something” was dead ahead. But not just another brief statistical shift in sentiment. Not a medium-term volatility shift. America, the world, are in a historic transition, a paradigm shift, a mysterious upheaval that few will grasp till it moves further along.
Dark road dead ahead: Yellen, Gross, GOP, off-center, all tested

More losses? How bad? Worse than 2000 and 2008? Yes. Wall Street, Main Street, Washington, the global economy, will all be knocked off-center. Traders are focusing on St. Patrick’s Day for guidance, below S&P 1,850, Dow 16,400, with a downturn accelerating after a macroeconomic news event in mid-April. For Wall Street’s short-term thinkers, all easy to dismiss, they make money on the action, up or down.

But this trader’s track-record says listen. His predictions fit our polls. The underlying reason is simple: Yellen’s policy is to keep printing cheap money. Remember last summer: Bernanke still in power? Wall Street feared Summers would hurt bonuses. Gross screamed, “QE must end.” Yet market kept rising. Pimco lost. Gross was off-center. His partner Mohamed El Erian left. Gross’s confusion was just one of many signs of a fundamentally flawed monetary policy dating back to Greenspan and Reaganomics

What’s ahead is even bigger: A black swan. Unpredictable. A macroeconomic catastrophe in China, Russia? Something politically dramatic, like the fall of the Berlin Wall? Oil wars? What do you see? Dismiss? Comment: Will 2014 continue the bull? Correction? Bear? The “big one” predicted for last year? Finally coming? Our poll resembles the one we reported on from 2004 to 2008, summarized shortly before the collapse.

To help you, here are highlights we reported over the last year. Read, comment, what do you see ahead? A critical mass of macroeconomic triggers that could accelerate a downturn, recession, something we’ll deny, never hear, till too late:
Gary Shilling: 42% decline in S&P ... and global recession

“With a global recession depressing corporate revenues, unsustainable profit margins and currency translation losses spawned by a robust dollar.” In early January Shilling saw “S&P 500 operating earnings ... a quarter below Wall Street consensus. Throw in a bear market P/E low of 10 and the S&P 500 Index drops to 800, a 42% decline.”
Bill Gross: Credit supernova dead ahead

In February, Gross warned of a “credit supernova.” Pimco has $2 trillion at risk if the Fed’s cheap money explodes, brings down the economy. Worse, “investment banking, which only a decade ago promoted small-business development ... now is dominated by leveraged speculation and the Ponzi finance.”
Nouriel Roubini: Global collapse, prepare for perfect storm

Roubini on Slate: “Sooner or later, another ugly fight” over debt, and markets get “spooked.” Any one trend “would be enough to stall the global economy, tip it into recession.”  MarketWatch