18 DEC 22, 2015 2:00 AM EST
By Mark Gilbert
Bloomberg
One of the
pitfalls of market-watching, whether for professional strategists or
journalistic scribblers, is a tendency to accentuate the negative. (I'm
ignoring sell-side equity analysts, whose preordained bullishness is largely
indifferent to the economic backdrop.) Gloom, doom and misfortune are more
interesting than cheerful optimism. And I'm as guilty as the next financial
soothsayer.
But it's
often a good idea to try to take an opposing view, no matter how compelling the
evidence for pessimism is (here's an excellent roundup of worries from Dave
Collum, who combines a passion for markets with his day job as professor of
organic chemistry at Cornell
University ). So here are
my two outside bets on what could go right on the biggest financial issues that
we're carrying into 2016: