Today I was talking to a brilliant young Canadian who has been accepted for graduate school in a science subject at MIT, Stanford,Berkeley,Princeton,and Harvard. He chose the latter though he much prefers the climate at Stanford. So does any sane person, I think. Well, I said, after you get your Ph.D. at Harvard you can do a couple of years post doc at Stanford. Then you can return to Canada in triumph and get a professorship. He said that he probably wouldn't return to Canada because Canada spends much less money per capita on research than does the US. This sort of thing has investment significance. For Canada read also Europe to which Canada is similar in many respects. Canada and Europe cannot provide labour as cheap as India or China. If they don't have new advanced technology to offer, how can they survive, let alone prosper and see their economies grow?
Here we see the other side of the US. We often discuss here the overspending of the US consumers and government, the crazy bellicosity of the present regime,etc.
But the US is still the world fountain of new technology. Only Singapore and Sweden compare with the US for adoption of the Internet for all purposes, to give an example.
So we have:
US: gone mad. No gun control either at home or abroad. Won a victory in Afghanistan and threw it away.
India,China: lack of transparency for investments.
Rest of the world: Sluggish. The developed part is aging and for the most part not increasing its productivity rapidly.
The undeveloped part is mostly pathetic, saddest on earth.
What a choice, eh?
I have 30% of my stock investments in Canadian and Norwegian oil companies, 9% in China and India, the rest in real estate shares of Canada and the European continent. Uneasy about the latter. Any ideas out there? |
