As a novice investor, my question is – with all of the intelligence on the web – I would think this could be solved and save our investors from this plight? The cause explained but no solution since the public has experienced this loss over and over. We send a man to space and can’t solve this problem?
Jim Paulsen thinks stocks are seeing the beginning of a refreshed bull market.
Despite recent Iran-fueled volatility, the market is flashing several bullish signals, he said.
Paulsen pointed to various contrarian signs like rising unemployment and peaked volatility in markets.
See more
“The end of…this…is nigh.”
That’s the warning from “The Big Short Investor” Michael Burry, “this” being the stock market’s blistering rally to record after record in recent weeks.
Burry said he believes the market could finally be on the edge of the major decline he’s been warning about, telling readers of his Substack in an early morning post on Monday that history seems to be repeating itself.
“With what is happening in the market the last week, that I had lived this before suddenly dawned on me,” he wrote. “The NASDAQ 100, complete reversal.”
The former Scion Asset Management chief pointed to the major rally in recent weeks, with the indexes climbing higher on strong earnings and optimism for a peace deal with Iran, even with no agreement yet in sight.
“I am calling something. The market has jumped the shark,” Burry wrote, later speculating that the conflict with Iran, the recent surge in oil prices, or a potential contagion event in private credit could all be triggers to a coming decline.
Burry pointed in particular to the tech and semiconductor sectors, which have been on a tear amid fresh dealmaking and strong earnings over the past month. The iShares Semiconductor ETF is up 65% year-to-date, marking one of its best-ever rallies.
In a post last week, Burry flagged an analysis from analysts at BTIG that showed the market, by some metrics, has eclipsed dot-com era moves. According to the analysis, the top 10 performers in the Nasdaq 100 were up an average of 784% over the past year. That compares to the average 622% gain across the top 10 performers in the year leading up to March 2000, the month before the dot-com bubble began to deflate.
The former hedge funder pointed to several charts that showed the “complete reversal” of the major stock indexes following the dot-com bubble and in 1929, labeling each peak with “You are here.”
The market environment looks “so familiar” to the months leading up to the dot-com bust, Burry added, suggesting that investors consider selling high-momentum stocks or reducing their exposure to the tech sector.
He added he had taken “significant” leveraged short positions against a portfolio of companies he believed were “depressed and cheap,” which is what he had done prior to the market crash in the early 2000s.
“My only thought now, this weekend, today, is to let people know where we are. We are witnessing history. In the stock market, that is not a good thing,” Burry said.
Burry acknowledged his reputation as “the boy who cried wolf” in markets, referring to his long history of making bearish calls on the market.
He argued that many of his social media posts in recent memory have been framed by the media as stock-crash warnings, though he wasn’t calling for a decline in earnest.
The national debt is set to reach $40 trillion in the near future if it continues to grow at its current pace. That has caught the attention of the richest man in the world.
Elon Musk has joined the likes of Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in supporting a solution to lowering the national debt, made famous by former Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
“I can end the deficit in five minutes,” Buffet said in a 2011 interview with CNBC. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3% of the GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection. Now, you’ve got the incentives in the right place.”
The plan received Musk’s full endorsement. “This is the way,” he wrote in June, sharing the interview in a post on X.
Last year, the national debt ballooned by $2.6 trillion, and currently stands at $38.9 trillion, or 124% of the economy, according to the U.S. Treasury. Recently, the country’s public liabilities, the portion of the national debt the federal government owes people outside the government, exceeded the size of the economy for the first time since World War II. Then, there’s interest on top of that, which costs more than $22 billion a week, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Buffett is far from the only one sounding the alarm on the national debt.
Recently, the nonpartisan think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) warned the average interest rate on the national debt could exceed economic growth by fiscal year 2031.
“Once interest rates exceed the growth rate…primary deficits will lead debt to grow indefinitely,” the CRFB warned in a blog post on March 9. The committee also endorses the 3% of GDP target.
While members of Congress haven’t warmed to the idea of being replaced over the national debt, a bipartisan group of representatives in January introduced a resolution to lower the deficit to 3% of GDP.
What capping the deficit would actually do
In 2024, under the Biden administration, Buffett predicted higher taxes were coming for businesses.
“They may decide that someday they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences. And they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn, and we’ll pay it,” he said at Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in May 2024.
At that point, the national debt was more than $34 trillion, or 122% of GDP. Buffett has rebuffed companies that search for the smallest loopholes to reduce their tax burden. Since the first Trump administration, corporations have paid a maximum tax rate of 21%, compared to 35% previously. This tax rate was not changed the Biden administration.
“My best speculation is that U.S. debt will be acceptable for a very long time, because there is not much alternative,” Buffett said.
Version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on March 17, 2026.
kommonsentsjane 