And he's now suggesting a new name to replace the "Dr. Doom" name given a few years ago when the Wall Street cheerleaders thought he was a loony crackpot. The new name is "Dr. Realist" which sounds reasonable enough to me. It's a good interview with his take on China buying US debt, US bank debt and even some praise of the Obama administration. He also is consistently in favor of temporarily nationalizing the banks to clean them up. Read on at Newsweek:
The rate of economic contraction you have seen in the last two quarters—6 percent annualized—is going to slow down. The optimists are already talking about the "green shoots" of spring, about economic activity becoming positive. [They say] we will have positive growth in the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter we will grow 2 percent over the previous quarter. They expect that next year, growth will go back to above 2 percent.
Compared with this optimistic consensus, I believe that the rate of economic contraction is going to slow from minus 6 percent in the last two quarters to minus 2 percent by the fourth quarter. Next year, I believe that the growth rate is going to be 0.5 percent for the U.S. average. Even if we are technically out of a recession, we are going to feel like we are in a recession. The bottom of the economy is not going to be in three months, but rather toward the beginning or middle of next year.
