Markets face arduous recovery

NEW YORK – After a year of devastating losses, the stock market has the makings of a recovery this year: nearly $9 trillion in cash on the sidelines, waiting to be invested.

But before investors can feel comfortable diving back in, they’ll need to overcome the chilling effects of a recession and their distrust of how Wall Street operates.

“So many people have been so badly damaged,” said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at Wachovia Securities, who has spent nearly 49 years monitoring the market.

Goldman said he’s never seen despair worse than it was in late November. Indeed, that’s a sign the market has hit bottom. And as moods improve, he said, some of December’s record $8.9 trillion in money supply, as measured by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, could be funneled back into stocks, bonds and other investments.

Fear on the part of investors and consumers alike could make the process slow and choppy next year.

Decades from now, economic professors may well point to 2008 as the year capitalism went on life support. Home prices sank further than any mortgage lender could have imagined. Banks including Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual Inc. failed, and many others received government funding or were bought up in desperate shotgun deals.

As investors recoiled and cashed out even their safe assets to build up reserves, the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled by as much as 47 percent from its October 2007 record high. The stock market’s drop between October 2007 and November 2008 wiped out more than $10 trillion in stockholder wealth.

In 2008, governments around the world have shoved trillions of dollars into the financial system, primarily by offering and guaranteeing various types of loans and investing in troubled companies. Signs are emerging that these rescue plans are beginning to stick.

But getting U.S. stocks moving higher again – let alone back to their 2007 levels – is going to be a long haul.

The credit crunch is forcing large investors from the super-rich to hedge funds to pension funds to governments to take on less risk. And after the news came out that investment adviser and former Nasdaq stock market chairman Bernard Madoff allegedly bilked clients out of $50 billion through a fraudulent fund, investors have even more reason to adhere to safer, tried-and-true strategies.

“Bernie Madoff has created a real issue for high net worth individuals, and it reaches around the world,” said Robert Howell, a finance professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “We’re not going to have people handing over millions and millions of dollars to hedge fund managers with no accountability.”

And because there will be less money invested, it’s likely there will be less market activity.

“I think the markets will have changed significantly,” Howell said. “When you have reduced activity, you don’t have as much pressure upward. It’s frenzied buying that pushes the market upward.”

Another factor that could limit a stock market rebound is a weak consumer. Personal consumption – which dropped 3.8 percent during the third quarter, according to the Commerce Department – accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity.

It would take a pretty horrific economic downturn to instill the same frugal mindset of those who grew up during the Great Depression. But it’s a pretty safe bet that when it comes to consumer behavior, the coming years will be different from the era spanning the early ’90s until now – when the Hummer, “bling” and $200 blue jeans entered our collective conscience, and consumer credit more than tripled to nearly $26 trillion.

Cutbacks will be drastic for the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs. U.S. unemployment is at 6.7 percent, the highest in 15 years, and some economists forecast a rise into the double-digits next year – a level not seen since the early 1980s.