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Here's the YouTube video of the third part of my appearance on Kudlow yesterday, in which I confront Barry Ritholtz with the inconvenient truth that his bearish economic analysis has produced horribly wrong market predictions, including last year's call for Dow 6800.

In response, Barry makes a classic mistake -- he really should go back to media training 101. Instead of just manfully saying, "Yeah, I was really wrong about that one," he tries to weave a preposterous story about how he really said the market would go higher. He did indeed say the market would go higher during the early part of 2006, but that doesn't change the fact that Dow 6800 was his ultimate target for 2006. He explicitly wrote about it in TheStreet.com, and he supplied that forecast to BusinessWeek as part of its survey of economists. From the TSC article:

I'll detail how to get to my 2006 target of Dow 6800 -- the lowest (by far) in the Business Week survey -- and lay out a scenario for how the S&P 500 could take a 30% haircut this year.

...I also forecast Dow 11,800 by mid-year...Why the bull call before the fall? Because that's how market tops get made...

...All it will take will be a modest earnings slowdown, and the Dow slips below 10,000. That happens, and apprehension levels rise in earnest. Dip-buyers who bought stocks 1,000 points higher are upside-down.

...If breaking 10,000 will make traders nervous, below 9000 the fear levels will be palpable. At that point, any one of our laundry list of negative catalysts might come into play. In my war-gamed scenarios, the dollar doesn't have to go into crisis, and the avian pandemic need not kill millions; instead, the investing public need only become alarmed that something nasty might occur to take fear levels up toward panic.

The move from Dow 8800 to 6800 won't be a rational, calmly contemplated affair. No one will be quietly wondering about option-expensing or multiple compression. Instead, it will be a severe overreaction to some external event.

So yesterday Ritholtz went on national television and claimed that that column was about how the market would go up in 2006. And he dared to call me "disingenuous."

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