Well, but then one excellent piece by Cassandra came in mind, see here: http://nihoncassandra.blogspot.com/2008/12/if-you-cant-tell-who-sucker-is.html.
The key message seems to me this:
I do not believe (yet) that we are about to beat each with bones back to the stone-age. But I believe that what we've seen in leverage and credit growth during the past 15 years is NOT normal, nor is it sustainable - neither relative to history or in absolute terms. And this return to what is sustainable, and serviceable has profound economy-wide, implications, and they are indisputably contractionary: deleveraging, higher savings rates, matching household consumption to income, and government revenues to expenditure. Add to this the impending pull of demographics, the emerging trend towards greater environmental consciousness and sustainability, and "normal" begins to resemble a mean-that is something of a much different magnitude, something still to the south of where we are that - in the big time series -
we will continue to revert towards from our presently divergent location rather than - as the Strategists imply - a normal that is something we've already overshot.
And then, the Mr Respect James Montier (he was blogging at http://www.behaviouralinvesting.blogspot.com/ some time ago) now at Societe Generale was writing once (but not referring to the blog post above) something like: "Remember. Cassandra was right!"
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