Ken Fisher Calls ‘New Normal’ Concept ‘Idiotic’

Bucking high-profile fund managers and their supporters, Ken Fisher said the next decade will be as good for investors as the 1990s.  At the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Sydney, Australia, the founder and chief executive officer of Fisher Investments dismissed the widely held belief that developed countries face below-average growth.

According to Bloomberg, Fisher said the concept of a “new normal” is “idiotic,” pitting him against money managers, including Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Co., who coined the term to describe a world of high unemployment, more regulation, and the shrinking importance of the U.S. in the global economy.

“We are chimpanzees with no memory,” Fisher said at the conference. “The next 10 years are going to be just as good as the 1990s. The problems in this current environment we think are so different, and so new and so unique. It’s the same stupid old normal we’ve always had. We’ve got a great future.”

According to Bloomberg, Fisher said any revaluation of China’s currency against the dollar is unlikely to have a long-term effect on investors.

Skepticism and pessimism are normal sentiments for investors 18 months after the bottom of a bear market, according to Fisher, who said in July 2007 that the global credit crunch was “just all minor volatility” and “just fears of much ado about nothing.”