On Wall Street, they call him Dr. Death. He’s also known as Martin Weiss, the provocative, perceptive, outspoken veteran investment adviser and editor of the Safe Money Report, a 28-year-old monthly investment newsletter out of Jupiter, Fla.

Mr. Weiss, who more often than not hollers fire when commenting on the stock market, is as apt to damn a company or an industry as praise them. Right now, he’s doing a lot more damning.

His current big picture – which he says includes more inflation, higher interest rates, climbing energy costs, and slowing earnings growth – adds up in his mind to a falling market and declines in companies that are especially vulnerable to rising rates and energy costs.

Mr. Weiss’s current bearish case largely assumes that “we could see a doubling of inflation and interest rates over the next year or two.” The two trends are clearly in force, he says.

Likewise, he says former stock market leaders have started to slow and even slump, technical deterioration has set in, and the foundation that drove the market’s advance, such as lower interest rates, has begun to fade.

Citing what he describes as “the risk of a significant decline,” Mr. Weiss says his analyses suggest the S&P 500 is 31% overvalued.

Dr. Death is especially bearish on banks, mortgage lenders, airlines, automakers, and auto parts companies. In this context, he has plucked a number of companies from his database that his analyses show are particularly vulnerable. Noteworthy in this respect are those thought to be especially susceptible to rising energy costs and rising interest rates. Included in his analyses are earnings trends, the balance sheet, credit issues, and stock price patterns.

While the shares of many of his out-offavor companies are already down sharply, Mr. Weiss sees more devastation ahead. Included in his hands-off list are AMR, AT&T, Cablevision, Continental Airlines, Countrywide Financial, Exide Technologies, Fannie Mae, General Motors, Ford, Interpublic Group, LSI logic, MAXXAM, Pope & Talbot, Pinnacle Airlines, Qwest Communication, Tenet Healthcare, US Airways Group, Viacom, Sirius Satellite Radio, Viacom, Visteon, and Westlake Chemical.

Mincing no words, he urges investors to “clean out such garbage from your portfolios.”

In fairness, it should be duly noted many companies he doesn’t like boast a fair share of bullish followers.

Inflation especially worries him. Here, he argues “the whole theory (espoused by many Wall Streeters) of well contained inflation is coming apart at the seams.” Inflation news is hitting like machine-gun fire, he says, pointing to:

* A 1.9% jump in the producer price index between August and September, the biggest monthly increase in finished goods since October 2004, and another 0.7% rise last month.

* A 2.5% rise in intermediate goods (such as cotton yarn made for a garment), the largest such advance since 1974.

* A sizable 5.3% surge in crude materials.

As a result, he says, more and more companies are being pushed over the edge, leading to a wave of price hikes by such companies as BASF, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Procter & Gamble.

Meanwhile, he adds, consumers are starting to feel the inflationary pinch. Evidence of this is a September jump of 1.2% in the Consumer Price Index, the most in any month since 1980. Importantly, he notes, late figures show not only that energy prices have gone up. Housing costs, he points out, are up 0.4%, double the increase in August, while medical care is up 0.3%, recreation up 0.4%, and education and communication prices up 0.7%.

Taking note of the Fed’s recent boost of the fed funds rate to 4%, he says this rate, once you factor in last year’s inflation pace of 4.7%, is too low by 70 basis points. It means, he says, that banks are borrowing for less than nothing, which, he points out, in itself is very inflationary. Likewise, inflationary fires are also being stoked internationally by the strong global push to take advantage of China’s huge growth, which in turn, he observes, is prompting central banks worldwide to print money like crazy.

So where do you run for cover? For starters, he thinks the boom in gold, energy, and natural resources is by no means over, despite some recent slowing. In this vein, he favors several exchange-traded funds that offer both diversification and liquidity, notably streetTRACKS Gold Shares, Oil Service HOLDRS Trust, and the S&P Select Energy SPDR Fund.

For conservative investors, he favors such investments as Fording Canadian Coal Trust (9.2% yield), Shearson Lehman US TIPS Fund (4.3% yield), and three-month T-bills.