Most of the time, the path to survival in financial bureaucracies is through company-party-line on-message bullishness. That's particularly true in the US, where pessimism about the future is not just bad business, but unpatriotic.

Not true today. More than sufficient electric shocks have been administered to the rats. Now, the corporate rodents know that PowerPoints projecting trees growing to the sky are going to get you fired, not promoted. Short-sellers are no longer bad people, but prophets. That's part of the reason why the optimistic case for equities is still generally dismissed.