Henry Blodget|Apr. 10, 2009, 10:49 AM
Blodget: Last question. You've been right in the middle of this meltdown day after day, interviewing the smartest people, etc. So is this a new bull market, or is this another suckers' rally?
Ratigan: Suckers' rally. No question. That's not an indictment of the judgement of the market. That's just my perception of the ability of the banks to function in a timely fashion, the ability to create meaningful amounts of jobs in the immediate future, and the as-yet unrecognized meaningful losses to come in commercial real-estate and other asset classes... We've gone through a transition where things were getting bad in a freefall, and now they're just getting slowly worse. So it's a transition from jumping out a plane without a parachute, and now, after a year of free-fall, we've pulled the parachute, which feels a hell of a lot better than the freefall... I think we're dealing with a problem that has a few years in it, not a few months.
Blodget: Last question. You've been right in the middle of this meltdown day after day, interviewing the smartest people, etc. So is this a new bull market, or is this another suckers' rally?
Ratigan: Suckers' rally. No question. That's not an indictment of the judgement of the market. That's just my perception of the ability of the banks to function in a timely fashion, the ability to create meaningful amounts of jobs in the immediate future, and the as-yet unrecognized meaningful losses to come in commercial real-estate and other asset classes... We've gone through a transition where things were getting bad in a freefall, and now they're just getting slowly worse. So it's a transition from jumping out a plane without a parachute, and now, after a year of free-fall, we've pulled the parachute, which feels a hell of a lot better than the freefall... I think we're dealing with a problem that has a few years in it, not a few months.
