Rosenberg on the Economic Crisis, Part 2

y Eric Jackson10/15/10 - 09:24 AM EDT

Editor's note: Following is the second installment in a three-part interview. Here is Part 1. Part 3 will be published Saturday.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Economic and market bears don't get more notable than David Rosenberg, the chief economist and strategist at Canadian investment firm Gluskin Sheff.

Rosenberg generated headlines this August when he advised clients that the "current economic malaise" is a "depression," and not "some garden-variety recession."

The former Merrill Lynch chief economist also was ahead of the pack when he raised alarms about the housing bubble in 2005 and warned of a coming recession in 2007.

In the following installment of my interview with him, he discusses why inflation is still years away, what the government should do to get the economy rolling again and whom the president should pick as jobs czar.

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Eric Jackson: When do we see real inflation in North America?

Rosenberg: A decade from now for sustained inflation. We know right now that corn, energy and cotton are experiencing price inflation, but I don't think it will be sustained. We're still in a deflationary environment. There's still far too much excess capacity in the U.S. -- for plant,commercial real estate or labor for that matter.

I think we're in year two of a six- to seven-year transition to the next bull market in the U.S. So it's going to take some time to create some meaningful inflation pressure.

Where are we in the debt deleveraging cycle?

There are two ways to delever: Pay down your debt, or stiff your lender. The fact that so many people have stiffed their lenders doesn't change the fact that we're still in this deflationary world where we're extinguishing excess debt. We've probably delevered 1 trillion dollars in household debt to assets, but we've got another 5 to 6 trillion dollars to go.

So, in terms of where are we with the whole deleveraging process, we're not at the national anthem, but, at best, we're just past the 3rd inning. We've still got a ways to go, and it's tough.

People say to me, "Where are the soup lines and bread lines if things are so bad?" I tell them, "They're in the mail, in the form of 99-week unemployment insurance checks." The U.S. government has managed to turn unemployment insurance into a quasi-welfare scheme.

When you take a look at organic real personal income, which is personal income in constant dollar terms excluding government transfers, it's still down almost 6% from where it was in 2007, so you tell me what kind of recovery we're in? That creates such a big problem. Consumers have upped their savings rate, but it's not enough to compensate.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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Rosenberg on the Economic Crisis, Part 1

By Eric Jackson10/14/10 - 12:10 PM EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Economic and market bears don't get more notable than David Rosenberg, the chief economist and strategist at Canadian investment firm Gluskin Sheff.

Rosenberg generated headlines this August when he advised clients that the "current economic malaise" is a "depression," and not "some garden-variety recession."

The former Merrill Lynch chief economist also was ahead of the pack when he raised alarms about the housing bubble in 2005 and warned of a coming recession in 2007.

Rosenberg remains pessimistic about the economy and contends that home prices could decline another 10% before they hit bottom, as you'll read in the following multipart interview I conducted with him.

You might be surprised, however, to learn that Rosenberg was an unabashed bull earlier in his career, that he believes a Keynesian approach can save the economy if done correctly, that he thinks the U.S. needs a jobs czar and that he sees the dollar rallying soon.

He's predicting gold prices will hit $3,000 an ounce in the next two years and believes a potential currency war is the biggest threat to the global economy right now.

He addressed all these topics and more when he recently sat down with me for the following wide-ranging interview.

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Eric Jackson: When was the last time you were bullish?

Rosenberg: 2000. Most people know me as a permabear. I'm not. I was bullish on equities in the '80s when I was a senior economist at Bank of Nova Scotia(BNS_) and nobody cared what I thought. Then in the '90s, I was also bullish when I worked with Sherry Cooper at Bank of Montreal(BMO_) and helped [with] her book Riding the Wave about the Internet boom. It was only when I started working at Merrill Lynch in 2000 and I saw the onset of the tech wreck that I turned bearish.

In the past 10 years, I've had different shades of bearishness. This has been the time when I've gotten notoriety, so people only associate me with bearish views. I certainly have been overall underweight equities in my recommendations. I missed two very significant peaks and two significant troughs. The reality is that nobody ever got hurt from my picks.

When did you first start to get ultrabearish about what you were seeing in the U.S.?

Since the dot-com bubble we've had a series of bubbles and policy reflation, combating recurrent market deflation, which has produced all this instability. There's no question there have been massive swings along the way. I have a nasty tendency to be early to a fault. I started getting concerned about the housing bubble in 2005 and very bearish on the economic outlook in 2007.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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