From MoneyBeat:
Albert Edwards’s Gloomy Tone Shifts to Top Gear
Jeremy Clarkson: a famous noisy car botherer with a penchant for the jeans-and-jacket look and half-joking polemical rants.
- Societe Generale’s Albert Edwards sticks with his ‘Ice Age’ prognosis. [note: not Albert pictured]
His equivalent, in London’s finance circles, is Albert Edwards, a strategist at Societe Generale and the market’s undisputed Bear-In-Chief.
Mr. Edwards, who has stuck with his ‘Ice Age’ prognosis of market doom since 1996, with patches of notable success, and long stretches of being very wrong, held his annual get-together at a swanky hotel in London Tuesday, presenting his reliably gloomy view of the world, along with colleague Andrew Lapthorne and former colleague Dylan Grice, to a large room full of men in dark gray suits.
Donning open-neck shirts in front of a suited-and-booted Mayfair-set crowd, the three looked very much like Mr. Clarkson’s Top Gear trio. With his floppy hair and head in his hands for much of the presentations, Mr. Grice, who now works for private investment company Edelweiss, was every inch the surly James May. The tone, in contrast to most rather dry presentations of this kind: laid-back, mildly back-slapping, peppered with questionable gags.
“People listen to me a little bit less when equities are going up,” said Mr. Edwards as he started his presentation, the second of the afternoon. “One way to deal with that is to bang the table more aggressively and become even more bearish. The other is to tell more jokes.” Or perhaps a little of both.
The title to his presentation: NO-ONE CAN HEAR ME SCREAM ABOVE THE ROAR OF THE PRINTING PRESSES. Not a QE fan, then.
Among his more questionable jokes of the afternoon was a reference to incoming and diminutive Fed chair Janet Yellen. Mr. Edwards noted the quirky link in recent decades between the height of the Fed chairman and the degree to which U.S. stocks have climbed under each chairman’s tenure.
“If you are going to appoint a Fed chair who’s a woman, at least make sure she’s tall,” said Mr. Edwards to the almost entirely male crowd. Yeah, we can’t reverse park either.
Why are Mr. Edwards’s research notes so widely read, and events so widely attended?...MORE
