While the recent surge is encouraging, it's still too soon to be talking about a market bottom, Pimco co-CEO Mohamed El-Erian said Monday.
"If you're intellectually honest, we simply don't know. There are so many moving pieces," the executive at the world's biggest bond fund told CNBC. "The reality is we were overdue for a technical bounce. We're getting it, but it's too early to call the bottom with any conviction."
The stock market finds itself on a four-day winning streak and has some wondering whether the market may have found a true bottom March 9 after it eclipsed the Nov. 20 lows.
But El-Erian said things are changing too rapidly and there is too much uncertainty over Washington policy-making decisions to declare that the worst has passed for the economy and Wall Street.
"It's an upside-down world where everybody is in the same boat and you need a lot of coordination so that we can navigate what are pretty fluid conditions," he said. "There is some good news but there's also some bad news."
One economic official drawing El-Erian's praise was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who spoke on the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" show Sunday and said an economic recovery was on the horizon, perhaps later this year or early in 2010.
"I thought he was highly effective," El-Erian said. "He came across as someone who understood the difficulties that face average Americans."