CNBC’s Ron Insana says America is already great, but he does admit the nation has many problems, “and some serious ones, problems that need intelligent fixes.”
He told the opening General Session of the National Conference of State Legislatures that “the November election stands as a big uncertainty for the economy. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.”
Who wins the presidency, he added, is not as important as what happens after.
“Can we find a way to move forward in cooperation around areas like infrastructure and not making policy mistakes,” said Insana, the author of four books on Wall Street.
“The U.S. has outpaced the rest of the world,” Insana said. “We have $90 trillion in household net worth. We are outgrowing the rest of the world," he said. “The country is great and has been great,” he added. “We have problems and some serious ones, problems that need intelligent fixes.”
Those problems include crumbling infrastructure and the need to retrain a significant portion of the work force, but he maintained those are problems we can solve with some political cooperation and resolve, NCSL.org explained.
Insana warned that investors should see “2016 as the year of living dangerously.” Tensions with Russia, terrorism, China’s military adventurism in the South China Sea and the chaos in Syria and Iraq all have the potential to affect the U.S. economy, NCSL reported.
However, not all market pundits agree with Insana.
For example, famed market bear Marc Faber, the editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told CNBC that stocks are likely to endure a gut-wrenching drop that would rival the greatest crashes in stock market history.
"I think we can easily give back five years of capital gains, which would take the market down to around 1,100," Faber said, referring to a level 50 percent below Monday's closing on the S&P 500.
When pressed on what could cause the decline he predicts, Faber responded that "you never know exactly why this will happen," adding that he believes the market's gains are unsustainable.
"The fact is, the market hasn't really been driven by genuine buying, but by stock buybacks, takeovers and acquisitions, and market leadership has been narrowing. It's not that many stocks that have been making new highs. It's quite a narrow growth of stocks that have been very strong," he said.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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