By: Mr.Fog on Sabato 17 Marzo 2007 15:39
...c'e' chi non capisce (Fugnoli), ^chi spera#http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/07/3011/goldmans-cohen-just-calm-down-this-is-not-1987/^ e ^chi vende#http://bigpicture.typepad.com/^.....a volte basterebbe leggere...
^By Stephen S. Roach#http://www.morganstanley.com/views/gef/archive/2007/20070316-Fri.html#anchor4577^
Sub-prime is today’s dot-com – the pin that pricks a much larger bubble. Seven years ago, the optimists argued that equities as a broad asset class were in reasonably good shape – that any excesses were concentrated in about 350 of the so-called Internet pure-plays that collectively accounted for only about 6% of the total capitalization of the US equity market at year-end 1999. That view turned out to be dead wrong. The dot-com bubble burst, and over the next two and a half years, the much broader S&P 500 index fell by 49% while the asset-dependent US economy slipped into a mild recession, pulling the rest of the world down with it. Fast-forward seven years, and the actors have changed but the plot is strikingly similar. This time, it’s the US housing bubble that has burst, and the immediate repercussions have been concentrated in a relatively small segment of that market – sub-prime mortgage debt, which makes up around 10% of total securitized home debt outstanding. As was the case seven years ago, I suspect that a powerful dynamic has now been set in motion by a small mispriced portion of a major asset class that will have surprisingly broad macro consequences for the US economy as a whole.