Barry Ritholtz of FusionIQ and The Big Picture blog says that, despite what the doom and gloom crowd says, America is not in decline. Ritholtz tells Yahoo! Finance’s Daily Ticker that “there’s a tendency for people to extrapolate the most recent experience out to infinity”, which is what many have done in expecting that the U.S.’s future will be bleak. He says that investors have to have an ability to “look over the next valley to see what’s on the other side”. He thinks the other side is looking good, citing developments in Silicon Valley as evidence. He also talks about why he thinks the U.S. is different than Japan, and won’t suffer the sort of post-bubble long-term malaise that Japan experienced.