The curse of the over-bearish (or over-bullish) magazine cover is well known. Of course, the media will only cherry-pick the "lows" as an indication that it's time to buy; as opposed to the exuberance-exhibiting article writers and their glaring headlines. To wit, this week's Barron's cover proclaims "GOOD NEWS - The US economy could grow this year at 4%... Forget the snow, consumers and businesses are ready to spend." Hhmm, it seems that Barron's forgot to look at the data...
The propaganda...
[8]
[As an aside - read the headlines on the left of the page also... quite the 'fair and balanced' perspective]
The reality (hope is fading fast and even the optimistic out-months aren't anywhere near 4%!!)
[9]
Simply put - the mal-investment-driven inventory-build (that among others, automakers are buried under [10]) is coming back to bite - as Rick Santelli so eloquently noted [11]...
Simply put, that is not the kind of "growth" and "consumption" needed to cover the massive inventory build
and so once again - thanks to Federal Reserve intervention - managers
have been 'fooled' into believing in the future sustainability, have mal-invested, and next comes another stagnation (and the cyclical downturn that we noted here [12]).
h/t Bloomberg and @Not_Jim_Cramer