"I won every argument and I was always wrong"

That's a quote from A.D. in the prior post on "The English Major". It could apply to the current view of U.S. equity markets by U.K. investors. For so many years a tried and true adage was that if you wanted to pick a bottom, go to Edinburgh and when they are most negative it's time to load up. You can never fault the Scots homework. It's completely irrefutable from any Yanks point of view. They quote history, precedent, statistics, and have an extreme tendency to want to overwhelm any listener with their intellect, which is without question substantial. The Scots are almost always polite, as contrasted occasionally to the Londoners who seem to know less, can be charmingly pompous, and just as negative if not more so at bottoms. Apart from Edinburgh's Standard Life there is only gloom and doom now coming from the Scottish Widows types in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London. It is possible that these firms have never bought and always sold a U.S. bottom with the most persuasive articulation of the reasons why, often entertaining I might say.

Apart from the major prognosticators like Soros and Rogers, and the major career building attention and money seekers like Roubini and Taleb, most U.S. observers are just on the sidelines and not cheerleading for a downturn. Stunned maybe, jammed up with withdrawals perhaps, but not seeing any benefit in throwing all of their chips on a felt called doom. That the diligent analysts in the U.K. are so obsessed with understanding the negative is a positive indictor, or certainly has been in all recent downturns. The more self righteously outraged they become, the better the expected returns.

This time may be different, it certainly feels worse, it does not feel like a situation that can be remedied in short order. The biggest issues coming out of this ultimately may be more political and social than economic. If the past, however, can be any guide, our U.K. brethren and their pent up resentment which has legs after hundreds of years is an almost flawless indicator of an impending rebound in U.S. equities and financial markets. It may last for some time if it happens but it does not resolve the bigger issues that have not been touched at all in recent years.