From Jonathan Hefferlin, a search consultant at MRI in Dana Point, California and a former TV commentator on financial topics:
So much money is being driven into the system that we should have a nice recovery starting by Q2 of 2009. …
Q4 (2008) will be bad, possibly with a -5% in annualized Gross Domestic Product. Yet with $2-2.50 gas and trillions ‘loosening up’ the system, we could have a quick recovery …
4,000-5,000 Dow predictions abound, citing the Depression market that didn’t recover ’till the 50s (20+ years). The 7,200 ebb in 2002, a level I foresaw a year in advance, might be the next bottom if 7,882 doesn’t hold. … I don’t see this market struggling for more than a few months due to the infusion of trillions. Markets project 6-plus months in advance, and the inevitable real estate ‘crash’ that highlighted this mess should stabilize by mid-2009 …
There is no doubt we are in a recession … unemployment estimates range from 200,000 or more jobs lost, perhaps more, in October, and nearly a million so far this year. The workforce increase, legal and illegal, requires 2 million new jobs a year for healthy growth (cut to 1 million now that a million returned to mostly Mexico, mostly construction workers who cannot find work). …
How bad will it get? Possibly 1.5 million jobs lost this year and an ‘official’ unemployment rate of close to 7%. This is why the average supervisory & upper level of unemployed should expect an average of 4.4 months currently to find a job, vs 4 last quarter.
