The Dr. Doom Space Is Getting Crowded 20 comments
December 31, 2008
-
Font Size:
-
Print
- TweetThis
Heny Kaufman, AKA Dr. Doom, lost substantial money based on the Madoff fiasco. The Madoff losses are a tragedy for those involved, but what struck me in this article was that I was unaware of Mr. Kaufman until now, and his Dr. Doom status. This now brings the total number of Dr. Dooms to four in my book, which has me wondering... how many Dr. Dooms are there?
Henry Kaufman, the former Salomon Brothers chief economist whose bearish views decades ago earned him the nickname "Dr. Doom," lost several million dollars with Bernard Madoff, making him one of the most prominent Wall Street figures to emerge as a victim of the alleged Ponzi scheme.
This is because, to my knowledge, in addition to Mr. Kaufman, there is of course Dr. Doom Marc Faber, the Swiss Contrarian in Asia before it was popular, and Nouriel Roubini, who I would say plays the part of Dr. Doom best if you've ever seen a video of him speaking. He probably is the most recent person to earn the monicker when his years-old predictions seemed to finally come through in 2007, though perhaps not for the exact reasons he initially described.
And finally, there is Stephen Roach, who is has long branded himself as one of the key bears on Wall Street, and who despite a recent embarassing about-face right before things collapsed, can still hold claim to being Dr. Doom due to sheer inertia.
The funny thing is that all of these very intelligent individuals nevertheless likely had very different explanations of the problems which the global economy faced and how things would unravel, yet all can now capture a share of the Dr. Doom glory. They do this by just being long known as a bear, by relating today's problems somehow back to their own original premises, or even just ignoring their original premises, not looking back, and describing and disparaging the financial problems which we now know.
Interesting lessons to be learned for aspiring pundits, though the Dr. Doom space now seems rather crowded. Probably best to now swing for the other extreme and build yourself as a well known optimist, though perhaps despite a tough market there is still an oversupply of such outlooks. Well, at the very least I'm pretty optimistic long term for the U.S. economy at least, so perhaps its time to start claiming the space.
Related Articles
|
-
The Seeking Alpha 100
See allThe top 100 stock
market authors
selected for publication
Seeking Alpha 100 » -
Fastest Climbers
Authors with the largestSee all
increase in followers
in the last 7 days
Fastest Climbers » -
Top Commenters
Top commenters,See all
as ranked by their peers
Top Commenters » -
Top Instabloggers
The 100 most active
Instabloggers.-
1
TraderMark
-
2
Don Dion
-
3
Cliff Wachtel
-
4
Mike Havrilla
-
5
James Quinn
Top Instabloggers » -
1
-
Top StockTalkers
TopSee all
StockTalkers.
Top StockTalkers »
This article has 20 comments:
the gloom in doom was brought about by boom...
the boom in gloom is mostly down to doom...
alphadominance.com/?p=...
The doom from the room is directly proportional to the lies from the ties.
It is for this reason that commedians and late-night talk show hosts began cutting them off their guests with pairs of scissors years back. The more a man prides himself in his sense of intellectual and moral superiority derived almost entirely upon inflicting pain and suffering on others, the more poets, visionaries and madmen will decry such atrocities.
If Wall Street truly cared about this county, it would shut itself down for at least six months and send all of the investor types out onto every street so that they could confront the real world face-to-face.
I see by my comment tickertape that I have finally achieved a zero balance once more. YAY! and good year to us all.
1. Nouriel Roubini
2. Peter Schiff
3. Nasim Taleb
4. Jim Rogers
5. ...
IMO
6.Marc Faber ( with his clipped germanic accent )
Glassman, a Harvard grad, has since moved on to other endeavors and is for the next couple weeks at least the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. The Albert Brooks movie, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" is a satire of the U.S. government's Advisory Board on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, of which Glassman had been a member. Key takeaway is that we should learn to take our financial advice from state university grads who prudently run mid to large sized regional banks. At least they aren't under the illusion that they can "change the world" as are so many Harvardians.
On Jan 01 03:43 PM kurt walter wrote:
> Didn't that Harry Dent guy write a book at the top of the internet
> bubble that the Dow was going to 36,000 from there? Now he is gloom
> and doom after the Dow has a horrible year? Seems Dent is a band
> wagon investor, who tries to make money by selling books during the
> boom or doom.
The real hedge is in being Realistic. But many a times they are confused with Pessimistic.
However, a clear trend is emerging. The winner is the person who is a Doomer when the whole world is Boomer and changes himself to Boomer when whole world is Doomer. The time when you have more Doomers then Boomers, start accumulating stock (actually this is what Doomers do). However, I still do not see the same happening at this moment. I still see many Boomers around waiting to jump in the ship as soon as it starts. The fact is it will not start till the time there are many waiting to jump in.