You can't trust anything these days. Take the innocent-looking tomato -- delicious, nutritious and now a weapon of mass digestive destruction. Or inflation, still soothingly low, so long as you don't eat or drive. Then there's Wall Street, where humongous earnings these past few years have fed similarly humongous bonuses. Sorry, wrong numbers. Just ask Lehman Brothers, which announced last week that it will report a loss of nearly $3bn (â¬1.9bn) for the second quarter, wiping out numerous periods of supposed gains.
The Barron's Roundtable represents a notable exception to the current bull market in duplicity and false impressions. Year in and year out, we can trust its members -- 11 of Wall Street's most insightful investment experts -- to give us the straight skinny on the economy, the financial markets and dozens of individual stocks and funds, even if the truth is sometimes painful, as it has been this year.
