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Early this week, Carl Icahn put out a video to express his concerns regarding risk assets called, “Danger Ahead.” The video, directed by my friend Jim Bruce (writer/director of “Money For Nothing“), is very well done. I encourage you to go watch it at CarlIcahn.com.

In it, he discusses what he believes to be ‘fallacious earnings,’ driven by faulty accounting, a merger boom and buyback bonanza. And for these inflated earnings, he claims investors are now paying ‘bubbly valuations,’ in both stocks and high-yield bonds at a time when liquidity has been falling dramatically. He ultimately blames the Fed’s zero interest rate policy for exacerbating all of these issues.

I’m glad to see someone of Icahn’s reputation willing to stand up and tell it like it is. But what I’m most impressed with, though, is Carl’s clear desire to try to help the little guy – which seems to be the whole purpose of the thing. He recently tweeted:

Today he warns:

I’ve seem this before a number of times. I been around a long time and I saw it ’69, ’74, ’79, ’87 and then 2000 wasn’t pretty. A time is coming that might make some of those times look pretty good… The public, they got screwed in ’08. They’re gonna get screwed again. I think it was Santayana that said, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and I am afraid we’re going down that road.

What I find most astounding, is the popular reaction to the video:

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Here you have one of the greatest investors of all time going out of his way to produce a short video intended to help the little guy and the response is dismissal and ridicule. And I haven’t read one article that actually addresses the substance of the Icahn video. They all resort to logical fallacies that support preexisting biases. Could there be a better contrarian signal that Carl is actually onto something AND that the markets haven’t fully priced it in yet?