Famous Last Words
From the WSJ comes a list…
Sept. 5, 1929 — “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.”
– Businessman and statistical analyst Roger Babson, quoted by John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Great Crash 1929″
Mid-October 1929 — “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
–Yale economist Irving Fisher, just days before the market crash
Nov. 6, 1982 — “Sell all stocks. This is a bubble market, not the normal entrance to a new bull market. … The recent rise of 37.1% in the Dow average in 12 weeks is the largest bet Wall Street has ever placed on expected economic recovery. It equals the final blowoff rise between June and September 1929.”
– Technical analyst Joseph Granville, after the U.S. had entered a new and at that time unidentified bull market
Oct. 19, 1987 — “The Dow could be as low as 1900 next February.”
– Market strategist Elaine Garzarelli of Shearson Lehman Brothers, a couple of weeks before “Black Monday.”
March 17, 1999 — “How high will the market go? … Our calculations show that with earnings growing in the long term at the same rate as the gross domestic product and Treasury bonds below 6%, a perfectly reasonable level for the Dow would be 36000 — tomorrow, not 10 or 20 years from now.”
– James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, in Wall Street Journal commentary
March 28, 2000 — “What we are concerned with is the market is not as undervalued as it was.” And: “We didn’t make bearish comments today. What we said was, we have been very bullish, that was correct. We now are less bullish than we were.”
– Analyst Abby Joseph Cohen, of Goldman Sachs, about three weeks after the Nasdaq reached what remains its all-time record, 5048.62. About two weeks later, the Dow and Nasdaq suffered their biggest point losses to date, 617.78 for the Dow and 355.49 for the Nasdaq.
