Ed Yardeni is President and Chief Investment Strategist of Yardeni Research. He has been a leading commentator on the economy and financial markets for 25 years, and his daily column has been required reading for Pinnacle analysts for years. Yardeni (at least for the time we’ve been reading him) is known for being generally optimistic about financial markets, which is another way of saying he tends to tilt towards being bullish whenever he can. Dr. Ed wears this on his sleeve, and isn’t at all nervous about letting his readers know that being optimistic is a much better way of viewing the world then the opposite, which tends to be downright depressing. Just last week Yardeni referred to bearish analysts as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” which you may recognize as the famous phrase written by William Safire for Vice President Spiro Agnew to deliver at the 1970 California Republican state convention in San Diego. The full quote, referring to the liberal press, was, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club… hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Last year I actually wrote to Yardeni to take him to task for similar statements about his optimistic world view, letting him know that we didn’t subscribe to his research because we wanted to read an optimistic assessment of the economy, but because we expected an objective analysis of the facts as he sees them. He wrote back assuring me that he does have a realistic world view, but feels that the pessimistic view of the global economy tends to get more attention than it deserves.
