Wednesday, October 07, 2009

"It's moving towards you..."



As in "Alien", no-one knows where it's going to come from, but there's a bad feeling around:

1. ... it's easy to see that a financial crisis is brewing. Somewhere, something is going to blow sky high...

2. I see more bubble trouble on the way. Risk assets are being bid up all over the world as investors look for higher yields.

3. "Why is liquidity going into the financial sector? It's because the real economy is dying [and] everyone is fleeing into the stocks and bonds because they're liquid at the moment..."

4. In November 2008, Chinese banks said they would no longer play by our rules. Top tier banks (Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) reneged on derivatives contracts. [....] This should have been headline news in every financial newspaper, but it wasn’t.

Ironically, it is Marc Faber who takes the comparatively positive viewpoint:

5. If you look at the next 10 to 20 years in the West, I don’t see how the lifestyle of the average person will improve meaningfully. On the other hand, if you look at a country like Vietnam, they have a GDP per capita annually of $800 which may go to $3,000 over the next 15-20 years.

2 comments:

James Higham said...

The CEBR projections make interesting reading. Govt debt 94% 0f GDP by 2013/14 for starters.

Anonymous said...

Well I'd be happy to maintain my current lifestyle. I'm not sure what else I can buy anyway - but perhaps that's the problem?

Vietnam has a lot of catching up to do of course, now it has ditched the communism that cost so many lives in SE Asia.