warren buffet...the optimist, page-19

"Buffett is the greatest stock picker ever. But he is not a timer of market cycles.

Either Buffett is correct about a looming recovery or we're entering a bigger downturn than he's ever experienced in his long and full life."

You are probably right about this, but what that proves that market timing matters very little when it comes to the long run returns of any asset class, in this case businesses. Buffett has made approx 22% p.a. for the last 50 years or so through GFC's, cold wars, oil crisis, at least four currency crises' just like europe is having now and dot com bubbles.

If you have read any of the Buffett biographies it becomes pretty obvious that every decade there is something Buffett doesn't get involved in be it tech shares, junk bonds, or Gold or whatever. Every time there is a chorus of people saying Buffett has lost it, buy and hold is dead and so on only for people to find BRK smashing the benchmarks over the decade.

What we learn from Buffett is that:
a) Markets don't matter, Good businesses do
b) If you find yourself disagreeing with him, use it as an opportunity to learn.

FYI, as a caveat to all of this Buffett is probably better placed to gauge the performance of the US economy than someone like Faber as Buffett has owns and manages hundreds of US companies and is aware of the costs, sales, earnings etc to a greater degree than anyone.