Hi David, the ancient Chinese saying applicable to your situation … “move a man, he becomes alive; move a tree, it dies”. Move and remain alive is always a good recipe for gene pool propagation, and so far has been a good way to stay alive in Unreal Tournament.
Yesterday my wife treated herself, scrubbed, then wrapped in lemon grass, herb encrusted and heated mud, held together by electric blanket, then worked over for 80 minutes, all for USD 55.
I am writing from a river view room on the 27th floor of the Peninsula Hotel in Bangkok, looking down on the very tame river, the sounds of boating activities blocked from hearing by the thick glass. The view from the bottom in Thailand, 4 years into its downward adjustment process, is equally quiet, and from the street level, very flat. Looking at most stock charts will reveal, not a V, but a tepid L locked into a price channel anchored to the value justified by the overall economy, with a long and spiritless tail. Looking at the bank deposit rate, 1.5% per annum seems the insulting norm.
So, at least in this imperfect comparison of Thailand with Japan, the Japan model is applicable, even though Thailand has none of the rigidities and inflexibilities of the land where the sun supposedly shines. I think the WSJ is full of bravado and graveyard whistle when it shouts that Japan experience is unique to those islands and only in one particular time at that.
Else I wonder why the low interest rate and beaten down exchange rate do not make the economy pop? Maybe the lack of pop and the absence of fizz has something to do with asset bubble explosion, debt induced deflation, cautious consumers rebuilding savings, and the lack of profitable projects and useful jobs.
I also wonder how many politicians, economist, media commentators even discussed the possibility with enough lead time, much less predicted what took place in Japan or 1929; actually I do not wonder, I am fairly certain that few did.
Yes, there are late-model Mercedes on the roads, even a Ferrari or two, but the age of 15,000 Mercedes purchased per annum in this country of what must be 60+ mm is no more. The shopping malls are open, stocked with some luxury goods, but accompanied by much that is less than super deluxe, and somewhat sparsely trafficked with customers. The tall and beautiful buildings are still standing, but the adjacent cleared lots are unused. There are some highway ramps leading to nowhere, and some nearly completed but possibly never to be finished luxury apartment buildings that could have looked grand but now only a useless and lifeless hulk.
Oh yes, one note meant for Maurice, the gold shop reported that people are rebuilding their savings and slowly buying gold, readying, traditionally, for the next cycle of wealth hoarding, transfer and destruction.
We visited a few really genteel and excellent Thai restaurants frequented by the ‘they’ crowd of this city, hidden in their own lush tropical oasis in the middle of the city bustle. For some reason, the atmosphere reminded me of the same type of restaurants in Latin America where the ceiling fans kindly circulate the not too cold and scented air around sumptuously provisioned tables surrounded by art and history, and the few lunch time customers speak of business matters in hushed tones. Lunch time is stretched over three hours with this ‘they’ crowd, unfamiliar with the pace set by the techno neo-glitterati, plotting and readying for another manic scheme to transfer much wealth from the deserving many to the rogue few. Dinner time in such spots are more fun, for people watching, seeing these same ‘they’ now accompanied by girls too beautiful to be family, too decorated to be colleagues, too mature to be daughters, and too young to be wives.
Outside, just beyond the barrier of tropical plants and broad-leafed vegetation, the usual traffic jam, pollution, tepid pace, the L with the spiritless tail, and the crowd waiting for the next wealth transfer revolution to be instigated, announced, encouraged, guided, and to take hold with a life of its own, coming to a full stop at another L.
Inside, Jay’s eyes roam in gyro-free state, independent of each other, and disoriented from the forward fixed head orientation axis. If I do not watch myself, I might get ambitious.
I have nothing dire or cognitively dissonant to report about the bottom of the tepid L with the long spiritless tail. All are as were, only with a reduction in pervasiveness and at far less expense.
Decisions made at each point by each one of us during the cycle of wealth design, creation, expansion, imagination, hallucination, transfer, and destruction matters to one’s starting point in the subsequent phase. Maurice is stepping into the microwave oven with presumably almost 100% allocation to one scheme, Pezz is stepping up to the podium of Nasdaq arena with deadly focus on one small-cap asset killing class, MeDroogies is hoping for the vibrant V to overcome what could be a limp-tailed L, and David is suffering from dissonance of reality and Jay talk.
One possible reason of the current state of lagging Australian reality may be that (a) it has a tiny population, (b) supported by mountains of ores, gold, and energy resources, (c) busy, luckily and unimaginatively digging wealth from the ground, (d) competing against no one, (e) tagging along with interest rate decreases and liquidity flooding, and (f) isolated down-under. In such an economy, if Australia is such an economy, than devaluation will effortlessly increase or at least maintain export quantity, and increase local GDP.
If what I described above is so, then I suggest the Australian model, unlike the Japanese model, is in fact not applicable to most of the rest of the world, saved for possibly Canada and some Pacific island with a fortunate stock of phosphate, and can thus not suitably be fractal scaled up to describe the real world of competing inventions, schemes, designs, implementations, manufacturing, and marketing.
If what I described is not so, then I imply that your reality is lagging and will soon catch up.
By all means, move, but think twice before moving away from the very lucky place that is Australia, and then think twice more.
Chugs, Jay |
