c0redump

中國政府做生意, 台灣政府搞文革!

God damnit, my blog template is messed up again... i swear i didn't do nothin =/
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Today I went to listen to a talk hosted by Business Today (今周刊) titled "The Flow of Wealth in 2008"
(2008 全球錢潮流向... http://www.businesstoday.com.tw/winwinsp/071121speech/).

The speaker was the former Morgan Stanley chief analyst in Asia, and the talk was very informative indeed. Even though he stuttered alot, I still found the speech very engaging. The speaker gave a very clear picture of how the most important countries in the world interact with each other (US and China, of course, but also India, Russia, Japan, etc) and where/why/how the money is flowing.

Essentially, he predicts that the US economy will be going down the drain at least until 2009. A US economic collapse is unlikely but possible... most likely it'll be stagnant at 1 - 1.5% growth (world average is about 2.5% this year) The dollar will continue to weaken until 1. Iraq war ends and 2. housing finishes tanking (apparently this will occur when Warren Buffet buys a housing related stock). China on the other hand is still all about real estate and energy and construction. The Chinese government is hogging the shares of State owned companies, so the stock market is extremely volatile. Real estate remains the single most important thing Chinese ppl invest in (he said, "buy some downtown office suites in major China cities and you can't go wrong"), but foreign luxuries and heavy industries will also be strong in the near future. He predicts that markets worldwide will be slow through the winter, but Beijing Olympics will pick up the Chinese stock exchanges starting February...

One interesting thing he noted was that the US economy is dictated by its current working generation. He felt that until the baby boomers retires from their political and business careers, United States will not make much progress as a whole in terms of productivity and economic growth. As for China, its government is so focused on making money it has lost track of the duties of an administration. Real estate, while strong, would become the cause for instability should the price increase continue to outpace economic growth (Chinese housing bubble). In comparison, Taiwan is facing much bigger problems than housing bubbles. In its current state of political madness, Taiwan is seeing a continuous outflow of people (and the money they carry with them) as businesses migrates to China. The fact that Taiwan economy is so closely tied with US['s slumping economy] doesn't help either. Taiwan is looking at a future of long recession similar to Japan today if the government cannot get its act together, create direct air route to china (三通), and passes policies to encourage foreign investments....

anyway, very interesting and educational stuff =)

Labels: economics

posted by wooden @ 7:34 AM