Doze,
Bernstein is all over the place with is advice/predictions. On on hand he says real return will be in the 2% range going forward but on the other he says we are in a raging Bull market with the USA being a better place to invest than Emerging Markets:
Bernstein: We've been secular bulls for five years now on the U.S. market. Our argument was that we could be in one of the biggest bull markets of our careers. That's still our underlying theme. I'm about the worst person to talk to with respect to short-term volatility and what's the market going to do this month or even this quarter. But the secular story behind the bull market in the United States is still quite good.
Although there may be some cyclical issues, the secular backdrop in emerging markets is actually much, much worse than people think. As a firm, we've been amazed at how poor the profit dynamics are in the emerging markets, yet people refuse to give up on these parts of the world. They still think these are the best places to go for growth in the world, despite the fact that profits data has been arguing for quite some time that that's not true.
There are some cyclical things that are going on in the emerging markets, and as a firm, we're trying to play that off and on. But the secular backdrop to emerging markets we think is really quite poor.