Beware the ides of March and all that! The moment I got constructive onthe market on Friday it was bound to sell off, that will teach me! I amnot entirely sure what put the skids up the market this time whether itbe another huge bail out for AIG, a shambles of a G20 summit or arealisation by investors that the end is nigh. As always I was thinkingabout life and this credit crunch in depth over the weekend and I keepcoming to the same conclusion. Savings rates have to increasedramatically, we the consumer, and particularly the US consumer andgovernment cannot continue to be funded by the Chinese, debt cannot berolled over forever and at some stage needs to be repaid. People areall concerned about the pension time bomb, the solution is simple. Wehave to stick a hell of a lot more in our pensions otherwise ourchildren and grandchildren will want to have us put down as they willrefuse to look after us physically and financially. More in our pensionfunds means a lot less in our pay packets, corporate profits down andconsumers saving more and spending a lot less and we all know what thatmeans for growth going forward. What worries me is that our futures,our children's future are in the hands of politicians that think the wayto get out of a debt bubble is to spend even more. These are ultimatelythe same people who did not police this situation, allowed AIG amongstothers to lose astronomical amounts of money and then bail them out atthe end (US tax payer is on the hook for $160bn plus so far!).Whichever way I look at it the future doesn't look so bright. All thatsaid the market is not going to go down in a straight line, maybe thegovernments beats the demons of deflation with moneyprinting/quantitative easing and creates inflation that is good for EMand certainly the lesser of the two evils, only time will tell. For the record not a great deal going on in my world, market was widerand there are bonds for sale particularly in the Steel sector however atthe moment there is no sense of panic out there, yet! I will repeatwhat I have said on several occasions lately, EM at these levels doesnot look like an attractive asset class (aside from the odd specialsituation) and I am thinking on this occasion EM is not ahead of thecurve.
Mr P......