This from Fleet Street Daily:

I attended a most interesting lecture last night at the London School of Economics. It left me feeling that anyone who rushes back into the stock market now must be barking mad (you’ll see why in a moment).

Entitled ‘The Subprime Crisis’, it was given by Professor Robert Shiller of Yale. Shiller’s well worth hearing on this stuff. A former advisor to new US Treasury boss Tim Geithner (“He had no idea this was coming”), Shiller forewarned of both the dotcom bubble and the more recent one in housing.

The lecture kicked off with a quick recap of how we got to where we are. These were the highlights:

• Psychological factors played a huge role. Irrational exuberance (a term coined by Alan Greenspan and borrowed by Shiller for the title of his 2000 book) caused bubbles to appear all across the world . Word spread that by simply buying stocks, or a house, you can become effortlessly wealthy. You can’t.
• Genuine financial advice was only available to the wealthy. Anyone who gives you free or “affordable” advice isn’t really advising you at all. They’re trying to sell to you. Hence many subprime borrowers got in over their heads – basic questions like “Can you afford this?” “What if interest rates rise, or you lose your job?” were left unasked.
• Individuals fell victim to Groupthink. Groupthink is where it’s in the interests of individuals to subordinate what they really think to what is acceptable to the consensus. Imagine a rating agency employee in 2006 saying to his boss: “I want to downgrade this debt. I think we’re going to have another Great Depression…” Not exactly a smart career move!

We were then shown charts of stock indices, p/e ratios and volatility going all the way back to 1870. Let’s start with the volatility.

There are only three points in history where we observe extreme volatility. One is right now. The others are 1987 and 1929.

The real terms p/e ratios chart was even scarier. The big bubble run up from 1982 to 2000 appears like the Matterhorn rising out of some hillocks. This, of course, is the bubble that’s now being corrected.

In percentage terms, we’ve only ever seen such a bubble once before since 1870. Yep, you guessed it…before 1929!

Why you should remain wary of equities

Shiller told us that, in real terms, the S&P fell 80% in the 1930s. So far it is only down 54%.

This means you still have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lose a lot of money very quickly. Will you take it? I for one hope you don’t…

Most of us have never been in this position at any time before throughout our lifetimes. Who alive today has first-hand experience of investing during a prolonged, worldwide, stock market and real economy Depression?

All we have to go on is the lesson from history. And that lesson says…stay out! Keep your cash as cash.

Why some will try to lure you back in…and why they might succeed

I believe we’re seeing a lot of Groupthink in the financial sector right now. Finance types make their living from stocks markets. So it’s in their interests to talk the best stock market game they feel they can get away with.

They did it during the bubble, happily perpetuating the notion that stocks generally go up so go ahead and fill your boots.

That nonsense won’t fly now. But there’s another nonsense that will – the idea that the correction thus far has left an unprecedented number of “screaming bargains” for you to put your money into. Thanks to Groupthink, many commentators are now crowding round this dangerous consensus.

Right now is not a time to speculate. It’s a time to protect your money. The best way to do that is to hang onto it.

It’s tempting to feel ‘contrarian’…to think that you could be among the financially savvy if only you’re brave enough. That’s why this consensus will enjoy some success… for a bit.

But it’s a thin line between bravery and foolhardiness. Do you wish to gamble that you’ll fall on the right side?

Another reason investors might be suckered back in early is that they worry about missing the boat. But I’m going to paraphrase a much smarter bear than my average self – Albert Edwards of SocGen. Investors needn’t worry about missing the party this time.

You can afford to be late.

Source: This Man’s Message Could Save You From Financial Ruin

If you want free market commentary today, go over yonder to our colleagues at Money Morning, who have it all under contrarian control.

Back here at the western edge of the Great Plains and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, there is a lot of empty retail space. Maybe it’s early in the summer shopping season. Maybe people are flying and driving less for vacation. Or maybe there’s just way too much retail space in America.

Either way, the whole geography of America’s strip mall retail network lends itself to huge booms and busts. And since we’re coming off a boom, this could be the bust. The architecture of the retail network offers you clusters of stores selling linens, patio furniture, $20 shoes from China, and huge quantities of chocolate. It all comes via truck, rail and container ship. And with global fuel prices high, it’s expensive to get things to the middle of the continent, a mile up from sea level.

But cheap energy convinces you that long logistics tails are merely matters of proper inventory management and just-in-time delivery. For the last fifty years, energy has trumped distance. That’s why America’s malls and stores are located in large residential developments which are themselves miles outside city centres. Fortress Wal-Mart.

Most of these future feudal outposts here on the Front Range of the continental divide were built by large national developers like KB Homes and Lennar. The homes are nice enough, with great views of the mountains. And they are conveniently located near grocery stores and shopping. But there are probably too many of them, and more still are being built.

They are not, we reckon, particularly well made. On the way to lunch today, our brother told us the Chipotle (a Mexican fast food joint serving enormous burritos stuffed with cheap calories) at Flat Irons Crossing Mall was vacant because the foundation had cracked. Other stores in the massive mall suffered the same fate. The mall is less than ten years old.

You wonder, with all the “For Sale” signs out front of these cookie cutter houses what these cul de sacs and neighbourhoods will look like in twenty years. Will people still live here and commute to work? Or will the whole economy of this particular living arrangement become a casualty of more expensive energy?

The word we used for it about six years ago was simple: Suburbistan. A place where the parts (copper wire, plumbing, wood frames) are worth more than the whole…empty tracts of houses built for people who couldn’t afford them with real money and which, in any case, are the ticky-tacky icons of a giant mis-allocation of the nation’s capital.

Right now, though, it’s not that bad. Times are tougher for sure. Good paying work is harder to get. This is a function of the globalisation of labour and free trade agreements. Jobs are created. But they aren’t the same jobs America created in the post-War boom of the 1960s and 1970s. They aren’t in manufacturing with high wages, lifetime employment, and defined benefit pensions (think General Motors).

The jobs created in America today pay lower wages and don’t come with a pension at all, unless it’s defined contribution scheme. New jobs come from services and retail (think Wal-Mart) and reflect the nation’s shift towards debt-based consumption and asset-based saving, neither of which lead to long-term capital formation. America is becoming a nation of window shoppers.

In fact, it’s evident now that capital is being either exported (as factories) or sold (as equity) to pay the bills (as debt). And that’s for the capitalists! For the workers and wage slaves, there is more job mobility, but less job security. Do you think it’s a good trade? How long before a clever politician begins appealing to the growing sense of resentment…and a desire for something “to be done” to someone?

The time is ripe on the national scene for a demagogue who appeals to America’s sense of injured pride and national greatness. That should be interesting to watch. Both Obama and McCain would fit the bill nicely, despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum. They share at least one belief in common: that State power should be used to shape people’s lives in whichever way the State chooses. America will be worse off with either way.

The country has huge fiscal and geopolitical challenges. It also still has a lot of nuclear weapons and, at least in Washington D.C., an exalted sense of its place in the world order. So much for American modesty, or walking softly and carrying a big stick for a rainy day. Watch out the anti-anti-American backlash.

Here in the mountains, Colorado has always been a bit of a boom-bust state. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it boomed with high oil prices. Natural gas drilling on the Western Slope boomed. Exxon Mobil opened a refinery in Parachute to turn oil shale into something like crude oil (kerogen). The U.S. Department of Energy even exploded a nuclear bomb underground near Rulison in Western Colorado to try and liberate stranded pockets of natural gas.

Nuclear mining! Lang Hancock would have loved it!

When oil prices crashed in the early ‘80s, Exxon shut the whole oil-shale retorting plant down. Who needs an alternative to crude when you have Prudhoe Bay, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and Saudi Arabia? Oil prices stayed low for years and people resumed carefree consumption. National law makers went on a long holiday from serious thought and a realistic energy policy.

But hey, these things go in cycles. People have always been thoughtless and unprepared in the midst of great luxury. Same species, different century.

If you’ve lived through a bust, you don’t forget it and you never quite behave the same way because of it. The locals still refer to the day Exxon pulled the plug at Parachute as “Black Monday.” The massive housing development Exxon built for all the future employees at the facility became a retirement community known as “Battlement Mesa.”