The 90’s were bad years for Bear fans. Measured by the Dow Jones Index, they had only one victory, a small 4.34 percent index drop in 1990, against 9 defeats. By the S&P 500 Index, 1994 was a Bear win as well, but by a wimpy 1.54 percent only.

The economy is showing distinct signs of slowdown, which is unlikely to end in a “soft landing,” but instead in something much more exciting and noisy. When you are flying as high as the economy has flown in the past few years, and the engine of speculative fever is abruptly turned off by NASDAQ’s fall, […]

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” wrote Emma Lazarus in dedication of the Statue of Liberty. It is a beautiful sentiment, noble if you subscribe to the altruist Judeo-Christian ethic. But its economic side-effects should not be ignored.

Personal income dropped 0.2 percent in November while personal consumption rose 0.2 percent. The U.S. savings rate, already negative, thereby lurched still further into the red.

As the tech bubble deflates, analysts are returning their attention to “value” stocks, in which the companies actually have earnings, and price-earnings ratios, by the standards of the tech bubble, appear more reasonable.

The stock market has been particularly fragrant over the last week or so.

Even some of the Bear’s normally bullish competitors are currently accepting that a recession is inevitable — four down days in the stock market will do that. Of more interest, however, is the question of what kind of recession we are to be favored with, and how long it will last.

This is the first of a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that, in the past 10 years, the proportion of ‘Sell’ recommendations put out by Wall Street houses has declined from 9 percent of all research reports to 1 percent. Accordingly, […]