Everything Changed in 2007

John Mauldin’s last outside the box commentary by George Friedman of Stratfor hit the mark in my opinion.  Regardless of whether the stock indexes come back and make new highs on light volume, or not, everything has changed and the world will not recognize it until the March 9, 2009 stock market lows are taken out.

Here are the last two paragraphs by Friedman:

“However we feel about the performance of the financial community since 2007, there must be a system of capital allocation. That can be operated by the state, but there is empirical evidence that the state isn’t very good at making investment decisions. But then, the performance of the financial community has been equally unacceptable, with more than its share of mendacity to boot. The argument for private capital allocation may be theoretically powerful, but the fact is that the empirical validation of the private model hasn’t been there for several years.A strong argument can be made – corruption and stupidity aside – that the real problem has been a failure of imagination. We have re-entered an era in which political factors will dominate economic decisions. This has been the norm for a very long time, and traders who wait for the old era to return will be disappointed. Politics can be predicted if you understand the constraints under which a politician such as Merkel acts and don’t believe that it is simply random decisions. But to do that, you have to return to Adam Smith and recall the title of his greatest work, The Wealth of Nations. Note that Smith was writing about nations, about politics and economics – about political economy.”