He concedes that the latest crisis, which began last summer with the subprime-mortgage meltdown, has been "like a forest fire," spreading throughout the debt market, sometimes jumping fire walls to spring up in unforeseen areas. Yet he's now confident that the "panic lows" in the Dow, posted on Jan. 22 and 23, when it sank as low as 11,508, will hold. To him, the Bear Stearns bailout was a crescendo event.

Certainly, the news is hardly encouraging these days, with scary economic and market headlines like those for Alan Greenspan's recent assertion that the current financial crisis is the worst faced by the U.S. since World War II. A nasty recession impends or is already here. But crisis lows are always accompanied by hair-raising rhetoric and dire economic forecasts.