What’s coming next, from the ‘Man Who Saw It Coming’

FT Alphaville ^ | 02/23/09 | Gwen Robinson

[TigerLikesRooster]

What’s coming next, from the ‘Man Who Saw It Coming’

Posted by Gwen Robinson on Feb 23 18:31.

The litany of dire predictions for currencies, commodities and the global economy in general not only seems endless - it is getting more predictable by the day. That is because few pundits are making any waves - or money - out of playing Pollyanna, as everyone from Jim Rogers to Nouriel Roubini well know.

While it’s an increasingly safe bet for analysts to leap on the gloom’n'doom bandwagon, there are a handful of analysts out there who get taken more seriously than most -

/snip

Among them, CLSA’s equity strategist Christopher Wood can rightly claim to have been more prescient than most of his ilk - warning some years ago about the consequences of exploding US mortgage securitisation and more specifically, about the growth of subprime lending. In his often colourful newsletter, Greed & Fear (which sadly we no longer receive), Wood has been banging on about everything from warning signs in the Baltic Dry Index for commodities prices to Britain’s banana republic tendencies long before it was vogueish to do so. As a result, he has been consistently rated among the top equity strategists on Asia and last year was billed by the Wall Street Journal as “the man who saw it [the subprime mortgage crisis] coming”.

That is why when he confidently insists that the gold price will more than triple to reach $3,500/oz in 2010, among other bold predictions, people begin wondering when to buy and how they’ll store those yellow bars.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Ping!

[unkus]

ping

[PGR88]

China and India - they are not “free-market” economies, but their advantage now is their high savings rates and the fact their citizens and banks are not burdened with toxic debt.

[AndyJackson]

I have seen this coming since 1976 when the wives of my colleagues in the Navy all became real estate agents and thought the real estate was the way everyone was going to get to be rich. Greenspan kept the gravy train going for 30 years. The hangover is a bear, and we have a FED and president who keep wanting to down another 1/5th of vodka to take the edge off.

[1010RD]

Nope. Those two countries are not it. They hold dollars and their own currencies are fiat. They too will suffer. It is a worldwide problem brought on by government meddling and precipitated by a two and a half year old Democrat Congress's new regulations on the financial industry.