Goldman’s Top Strategist Says We’re Heading For A 2008 Financial Crisis, But What Does He Know?

Markets wobbled Wednesday after Goldman Sachs’ chief global equity strategist, Peter Oppenheimer, warned that conditions are increasingly reminiscent of the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Naturally, investors everywhere immediately concluded that the most rational response was to ignore him completely and buy more tech stocks.

Here’s a quote from Fortune: “In a research note published Wednesday, Oppenheimer warned equity risk premia—a measure of how much extra return investors demand for owning stocks over safer assets—“have fallen sharply and are now, mostly, back to levels seen in the run-up to the financial crisis.” That signal, Oppenheimer wrote, has left equities “more vulnerable to disappointments or shocks” driven by technology competition or a worsening growth-inflation mix.​”

“Look, I’m sure he’s very smart,” said retail investor Kyle M., refreshing his brokerage app for the 97th time before lunch. “But if Goldman actually knew what was going to happen, wouldn’t they just quietly short everything and go on vacation?”

Kyle then immediately purchased $12,000 worth of whatever was trending on finance Twitter.

Markets briefly dipped following the warning, before recovering once traders remembered that predicting financial crises is historically a terrible career move. Analysts who called the last crisis were widely ridiculed for years, right up until the moment they were proven completely correct, at which point they were quietly ignored again.

“We’ve stress-tested our portfolios,” said one hedge fund manager. “If markets fall 30%, we pivot to calling it a ‘temporary liquidity event.’ If they fall 50%, we pivot to calling it ‘an opportunity.’”

Meanwhile, financial television spent the afternoon hosting a panel of experts who agreed that the strategist might technically have a point, but that markets could also “continue going up forever,” which everyone agreed sounded significantly better.

Retail traders, for their part, remained unfazed.

“Every year someone says ‘this is just like 2008,’” said another investor while purchasing weekly options that expire in four hours. “And every year the market keeps going up. So statistically speaking, the economy should collapse any day now, but probably after my calls print.”

At press time, markets had rallied after a separate Goldman note reassured clients that while a financial crisis was possible, the bank remained “constructively optimistic on risk assets,” a phrase widely understood to mean please keep trading so we can collect the fees.

Sources confirmed that if a crisis does occur, Goldman analysts will immediately release a report titled “Why No One Could Have Seen This Coming.”