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| There is no way to tell.
Senior may have a better answer,
but the only way I can recognize a top is after it has taken place.
I have watched folks go broke picking tops and bottoms.
We have seen the dot com bubble take the stock market down to the
1997 level in 24 months, then return to the 2000 highs.
This was pretty nasty ..
IF you owned stocks ..
the average common man does not .. still 7 years for the round trip = lost time.
We have seen the real estate market go up by a factor of 5 ..
for the person who bought 10 or more years ago,
then refinanced at the Greenspan lows, with no plans to sell ..
the up and subsequent decline is not going to cause any net harm.
We are now seeing the banking sector (JP Morgan, Merrell, Bear Sterns, BoA, Countrywide and several others) unravel ..
all for the pursuit of the extra couple of points at the margin.
Many mortgage brokers have already fallen to the dust.
Perhaps we'll see a few of these big guys disappear .. get merged into a stronger unit.
The next media event could be credit card debt (almost a trillion dollars),
perhaps combined with the alt-a and/or prime mortgage collapse.
Or the lousy 2007 Christmas retail season, or a some other blended derivative ..
lets call it a DSD (dumb and stupid derivative)
or it may come from another part of the globe,
or it may be weather related.
Whatever pushes this thing over the top will be unforeseen, un-forecast and unknown.
You can be sure the vultures are perched,
and they will swoop down in a second,
as soon as there's blood smelled.
They don't wait for it to flow in the streets anymore.
all us small fry can do is watch and prepare.
and not get carried away by the unbelievable biased reporting of the world media.
Who knows .. it might never take place.
"When the thunderclap comes, there is no time to cover the ears"
- Sun Tzu
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impending financial disaster
