Today's disasters, tomorrow's bright spots - Investors are behaving as if a future of unrelieved darkness were absolutely certain. Hardly -- and the far brighter reality will pop up in the unlikeliest places.

moneycentral.msn.com By Jim Jubak About this time in 2000, investors couldn’t imagine anything but good news. The economy would keep on growing at 5% or better, interest rates would keep on falling and stocks would climb to the sky. By projecting that good news into the future, investment gurus came up with predictions for Dow 36,000. Right now, it’s just about as hard to imagine anything but bad news. The consumer is about to stop buying cars and houses. Two-dollar-a-gallon gas is just the beginning of years of climbing energy prices. Interest rates will return to the double-digit levels of the early 1980s, thanks to an explosion of government debt. And unemployment will soar to 8% or more thanks, to slow growth at home and vicious competition from China and elsewhere overseas. And of course, nobody in the United States will be able to afford to retire.Fast filing = fast refund! Do your taxes online. And by projecting this bad news into the future, a different set of investment gurus now predicts Dow 700. Reality tripped up the rosy projections of 2000. For example, accounting scandals revealed that earnings growth at companies ranging from Qwest Communications (Q, news, msgs) to Bristol Myers (BMY, news, msgs) had been all smoke and mirrors. And reality will do the same to the gloomiest scenarios of 2003 by delivering positive surprises in the unlikeliest places. Here’s a short list of three areas that seem especially likely to deliver positive surprises. Surprise 1: energy prices No doubt about it, in the short run, the world’s economies are going to get slammed by $40-a-barrel oil. Or worse. Oil inventories are much lower than they were before the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and thanks to a crippling strike in Venezuela’s oil industry, oil-producing countries are already pumping about as fast as they can. The whole system is one unexpected event away from major disruption. But in the long run, look for surprisingly low prices, thanks to new supplies from Russia. Russia is now the second-largest oil producer in the world -- but much of that oil never gets beyond the country’s borders, thanks to an inefficient delivery system. For example, Russia can’t get more than a dribble of oil to its two biggest potential markets, China and Japan, because it doesn’t have the pipelines in place to send oil in that direction. It’s no surprise, then, that even when oil sells for $30 a barrel on the international market, it often goes for just $5 a barrel in a glutted domestic economy.