Kass: Welcome to Dystopia

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Nov. 3 at 8:43 a.m. EST.

As investors, we now face a dystopian future.

Our future has been purchased from the past. My vision of the future does not preclude a stable/better stock market over the next several months but it does make the argument that disappointing or substandard investment returns seem the most likely outcome over the next three to five years in an economy that has suffered a massive coronary and that lacks future clarity.

I expressed concerns regarding an imminent depression in housing three years ago, and then, two years ago, I began to cite the alarming use of credit that could have dire consequences. When the excrement starting hitting the fan, I wrote that the outlook for the highly levered consumer (and for the economy as a whole) sat squarely on the shoulders of stock prices, which is the other significant household asset that, up to mid-2007, had held price. I opined that a dependency on steady or improving equities was a slippery slope because so much can and usually does go wrong in the stock market. ...