The Bulls & Bears at Davos

The 40th anniversary of the Davos Annual Meeting is a defining moment for world leaders as they meet under the theme “Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild”. Over 2,500 leaders from over 90 countries representing business, government and civil society will work together on pressing challenges. 

And, like last year the bears are brandishing their claws again, even as investors declare it’s time for them to hibernate. Billionaire George Soros, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Roubini Global Economics LLC Chairman Nouriel Roubini return to the Swiss ski resort this week warning the economic recovery will prove weaker than financial markets are betting and the 10- month rally in global stocks may falter.

The timing could hardly be worse, coming just as major banks and securities firms announce bonuses for 2009!

Total executive compensation for the year is expected to be nearly $150 billion for U.S. institutions alone, based on an examination of securities filings. Public wrath is running as high as ever, with everyone from President Barack Obama to tabloid editors taking aim at bank executives. Worse still, Davos and the bonus season come amid blanket coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for public-relations firm Weber Shandwick. “Davos represents a serious forum and they should be part of it. But, to Main Street, it’s the Alps versus Haiti right now.

Hello! 

Investors are lining up against the pessimists, who were lauded at last year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum for predicting the economic and financial crisis. The MSCI World Index of stocks is up 67 percent since March, as money managers at companies including BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, and Barton Biggs’s Traxis Partners LP buy equities partly on the expectation the recovery will strengthen.

BlackRock predicts the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will end the year at 1,250, up 13 percent from the Jan. 22 close, and the 10-year Treasury note will yield almost a percentage point more at 4.5 percent. Biggs began 2010 projecting a 10 percent gain in stocks and the dollar.

Roubini’s firm forecasts corporate bonds will outperform equities, the dollar will weaken and the interest rate on longer-dated U.S. government securities will fall toward the end of the year. A report with specific projections is currently being prepared.  “If I’m correct, by the second half of the year there’s going to be a slowdown of growth in the U.S., Europe and Japan,” Roubini said in Hong Kong on Jan. 21. “That could be the beginning of a market correction, because the macroeconomic news is going to surprise on the downside.”

Don’t you hate it when Roubini is right!

Who is right will be one of the debates dominating this week’s 40th Davos conference of more than 2,500 political, business and financial leaders. With the crisis ebbing and the International Monetary Fund set to raise its forecast for global growth in 2010 from 3.1 percent, “the mood is likely to be upbeat,” said Niall Ferguson, 45, a history professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Dr. Dooms will be somewhat at a discount in the Davos market.” 

Investors are nevertheless upbeat. Forty-three percent of respondents in a quarterly global poll of market professionals who are Bloomberg subscribers said the international economy is improving, up from 37 percent in October. Thirty-eight percent said their country’s benchmark stock index will rise in the next six months; 33 percent say it will vary little and 27 percent say it will fall. “The global economy is picking up strength,” said Traxis Managing Partner Biggs, 77, who piled into equities at the bottom of the market in March.

You place your bets and we’ll spin the wheel! Las Vegas all around the world.