The photo cutline on my January 2 New York Sun column accurately described the column's contents: "Hardly anyone is saying this publicly, but the stock market could be in for a repeat of the 2009 rebound."
Lo and behold, January 4 at noon, the vice chairman of $951 billion asset manager Blackstone, Byron Wien, and Joe Zidle, Chief Investment Strategist in the Private Wealth Solutions group at Blackstone, released their "Ten Surprises of 2023."
From the release: "Byron defines a 'surprise' as an event that the average investor would only assign a one out of three chance of taking place but which Byron believes is 'probable,' having a better than 50% likelihood of happening. Byron started the tradition in 1986 when he was the Chief U.S. Investment Strategist at Morgan Stanley."
Surprise number 4 on the Wien list is "Despite Fed tightening, the market reaches a bottom by mid-year and begins a recovery comparable to 2009."
For context, in 2009 the S&P 500 Index was up about 67 percent from the March 6 bottom to the December 31 year-end. Look out, above.
The whole Wien-Zidle list is worth a look. I tend to agree with the views on Twitter's "path to recovery" and on Ukraine heading toward a negotiated settlement.
Wien was a Harvard Crimson editor during the 1950s when it was, as he once put it, "a true meritocracy, where any day you could find some future major journalist like Jack Rosenthal, David Halberstam or Tony Lukas." (That was also the Frank Brandeis Gilbert era.)
Anyway, on the 2023 and 2009 comparison, we now have Stoll, Wien, and Zidle. Who will be next?