Gloom & doom

Bloomberg Customers See a (Mostly) Grim Future: The Ticker
The quarterly poll of global investors, analysts and traders conducted by Bloomberg this week presents an almost unrelentingly gloomy picture.
Europe’s debt crisis, respondents said, is likely to morph into an economic slump that will drag the world into recession. Even the outlook for China, reliably an economic superstar in past surveys, is dire: growth there is expected to slow to less than 5 percent annually by 2016, half the pace of the past three decades.
Perceptions of U.S. President Barack Obama have plummeted since the last poll was conducted four months ago. Three-quarters of global investors now see his policies as a drag on the U.S. business climate, and 57 percent view him unfavorably, a reversal from a poll in May when 55 percent saw him favorably. The standing of the leader at the epicenter of the European crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, also has reversed course: 59 percent of investors say they are pessimistic about her policies. In May, 55 percent said they were optimistic.
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Comment: Too much gloom, so it seems - a fact which actually should speak in favor of a turn-around.