Hi Carl,
"Russia is a symptom, not the problem itself. The problem is that the
world economy is crumbling, one country after another."
No way can I go along with that.
There seems to be a lot of wrong perceptions of Russia. Russia as an economic power is a nonentity. Economically it's not on the map and never has been. Russia came out of surfdom late in the last century, the free market economy did not work then and communism told hold in 1918. 80 years later and 8 years out of communism, surprise surprise, the Russians still can't get free market economy to work. The problems are manifold, but deflation is not amongst them CORRUPTION is at the top of the list, along with over 300% inflation (hardly what you would term deflationary)
"The problem is that the world economy is crumbling"
I feel you overrate the Japanese. Japan has the second largest economy in the world. Their banks are unfortunately unwilling to bring themselves and their practices into this century. Eventually they will, freely or by legislation. The world is attuned to bad news at present, and it seems to have gone by largely unnoticed that the YEN has stabilized in the past 2 weeks, about 4 YEN above its recent low. This is encouraging sign.
Other economies in Asia are not crumbling, they are correcting. Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia in particular have been living way beyond their means in the past 15 years or so, and their debts have caught up with them. It happened to many European post war economies too.
Lastly, the DOW only last month hit several all time highs. Hardly a sign of lack of confidence.
We are going through a turbulent phase, many unrelated events are happening in parallel. It is all to easy to draw the wrong conclusions.
By the way, you mention "high interest rates" in the US. I thought they were at near post war low levels
Regards
Alan |
