Lot of big desks already forecasting global slowdown, professionals heading to exits bigtime now…

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The S&P 500 Has a Tangible Net Worth Problem

When third-quarter earnings reports come out in a few weeks, the bottom lines of companies in the S&P 500 are expected to be up an average of nearly 20 percent compared with the quarter a year earlier, signaling a continuation of good times for corporate America. Profits rose just more than 24 percent in the second quarter.

But another metric of financial health suggests all may not be as rosy as it first appears. The tangible net worth, or book value, of S&P 500 companies has been falling this year. The last time it had a sustained drop was right after the financial crisis in 2008. The time before that was in the previous recession in 2001.

These Four Predicted The Global Financial Crisis; Here’s What They Think Causes The Next One

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A different kind of hurricane slammed into the American East coast, the nation and ultimately the world ten years ago today.

Amidst the multiple introspective columns and soul searching that naturally occurred this week, which looked back on the missed warning signs behind the 2008 financial collapse exactly a decade ago this weekend, there is a small group of people whose opinions are actually worth paying attention to.

Though arguably no single individual accurately called all aspects of the crisis in its entirety, precipitated by the implosion of Lehman Brothers, some did very publicly predict key facets with prophetic clarity. As Market Watch’s Howard Gold explains in his profile of four analysts the world should have been listening to: “People warned about subprime mortgage loans, derivatives, and too much leverage, but nobody, to my knowledge, said a bursting housing bubble would cause a global crisis that would lead to the demise of venerable financial firms, require trillion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, and cause a recession that rivaled only the Great Depression in its magnitude.”

Trouble is like many religious prophets of ancient history, they were rejected at the time, cast as dour harbingers of gloom and doom.

Clockwise from upper left: Gary Shilling, Jim Stack, Raghuram Rajan and John Mauldin. Via MarketWatch

 

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