What you're now seeing is profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it....The market bottomed six days later.
Like the Nobel Peace Prize announced on October 9th of that same year, our award was aspirational.*
From Barron's:
Falling oil prices and better labor markets augur more gains in the new year, says the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Health care is helping, too.
Coming off a solid economic performance in 2014—marked by improvements in hiring, wages, and corporate investment—the U.S. should expect an even better new year, says Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. In an interview with Barron’s, Furman says, “There’s no reason we can’t continue to have a strong economy in 2015.”
Furman’s bullish outlook isn’t hugely different from the consensus view, though some of the sources for his optimism are. Overlooked, he notes, is that health-care costs are falling and the pace of insurance-premium growth is slowing, aiding consumers. In our wide-ranging talk, the economist also mentioned intellectual influences as diverse as liberal favorite, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, and former Ronald Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein, of Harvard University. He also pointed us to some of his favorite pieces of data, including real private domestic final purchases, or PDFP, and gross domestic product tracking firms.
CEA Chair Jason Furman equates the fall in oil prices to a big tax cut.
From an office suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with views of the White House, the 44-year-old New York native’s job is to give President Obama a heads-up on economic developments. The president via Furman sees major government economic data the day prior to public release.Do "Air quotes" seem vaguely Dr. Evil-ish coming from Presidential advisers?
The two go back years. Harvard-trained Furman, after a stint in the Clinton administration and the Brookings Institution, advised candidate Obama on the campaign trail.
Like most economists, the head of the CEA sees big benefits from falling energy prices, which he says will provide the U.S. economy with a tail wind that will more than offset any drag from our more constrained major trading partners in Europe and Asia.
“Its primary effect is in the form of a tax cut that is very, very substantial; and the economic benefit of that outweighs anything else in terms of the economy because the U.S. remains a net importer of oil,” says Furman. We were surprised to hear a tax analogy from a member of an administration that seems to favor the stimulus of big government spending programs versus across-the-board reductions in federal taxes....MORE
*See also:
UPDATED--President Obama, U.S. Trader-in-Chief, Begins Market Play by Play (PRES; CinC)
