By: GZ on Domenica 25 Marzo 2007 01:32
Sì questa è l'apparenza creata dalla grassa situazione finanziaria
Gli stati e i governi peggiori e più pericolosi del mondo stanno arricchendosi come mai è successo loro per cui gli conviene per ora tenere a freno i terroristi e minimizzare le tensioni in modo approfittare della situazione e incassare il massimo fino a quando dura (arabia saudita, libia, iran, russia, venezuela, cina che per chi lo avesse dimenticato è una dittatura armata fino ai denti)
In realtà è l'opposto. ^Un mese fa su Barron's#http://online.barrons.com/public/article/SB117348422561932744-lnDJ7Rk9pVwPHjMTdovvzB9fcAo_20070323.html^ c'era lo storico inglese contemporaneo più promettente NIALL FERGUSON, che vedeva paralleli con il 1914 e faceva notare che all'epoca fino praticamente al giorno dell'inizio della guerra i mercati dell'epoca non cominciarono a cedere e contrariamente a quello che spesso si dice non presentirono niente e non prezzavano per niente il rischio della guerra imminente ("....Ferguson is intrigued by the behavior of the financial markets on the eve of World War I because stock and bond prices at the time registered scant concern about the impending cataclysm...")
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...Ferguson offers fresh historical perspective. One of his key themes is the economic, social and political parallels between the world today and on the eve of World War I. The period from 1880 to 1914, which he calls "the first age of globalization," has more in common with our own time than "any other intervening period," he says. By recognizing the similarities, it follows, we can also learn from past mistakes.
The pre-war era was characterized by relatively steady economic growth, low inflation, growing world trade, benign and liquid capital markets and a widespread belief in the ability of Great Britain, the world's reigning military power, to keep world peace. Similar circumstances prevail today, though the U.S. has assumed the role of global cop.
The first age of globalization ended in the carnage of World War I and ensuing revolutions and financial dislocations. While Ferguson doesn't see another world war looming, a geopolitical shock, he argues, could dry up financial liquidity, now abundant, and shut global stock exchanges, as happened after war broke out in 1914.
"Niall asks the question, 'Is the world a riskier place?'," says David Bowers, the global strategist with Absolute Strategy Research in London. "After the past week, it's a very relevant question."
Adds Mohamed El-Erian, president of Harvard Management, which runs the university's $29 billion endowment: "Niall has an ability to understand both current issues and historical trends. He reminds people that a catalyst for a significant market move can be quite small. The smart money likes to have a historical perspective."
Geopolitical risk is a vexing problem for professional investors. While they might recognize the dangers, they can lose their jobs if they are excessively defensive and hold too much cash in a rising market.
Ferguson acknowledges this. "If we all get caught in a 1914-style crisis, we all go down together and nobody will underperform the benchmark," he says. "But if I become pessimistic too early and I'm wrong, I definitely will underperform. Therefore it's better to consign a major geopolitical crisis to the realm of uncertainty, and treat it like the risk of an asteroid hitting the earth. Common sense tells us that a major war is much more likely than an asteroid, or indeed the melting of the polar ice caps. But there are incentives for investors and financial professionals to ignore the risk of crises."
Ferguson concedes it's hard to assemble an investment portfolio to withstand geopolitical shocks, although holding some cash would be a good start. He worries that the standard recommendation, domestic and foreign stocks, as well as bonds, "no longer provides adequate protection. In an extreme scenario, most securities may sell off. Mainstream asset classes have become more correlated in recent years."
Thus, he says, there may be a case for adopting "the old Rothschild principle": a third in securities, a third in real estate and a third in art. "But I'd go further than that," he says. "I'd want some exposure to commodities, but I would no longer privilege gold. If you're worried about a big war, buy missile manufacturers and sell investment banks." Ferguson, incidentally, has written a two-volume history of the great European banking family, drawing on thousands of documents from the Rothschild archives.
One reason Ferguson is an eagerly sought-after speaker, El-Erian says, is because "he comes across clearly and concisely and has the self-confidence to engage in heated discussions."
Ferguson says he likes talking to sophisticated investors because "it gets me in contact with financial practitioners. It's a reality check." Financial types are much less deferential than university students, he notes.
AS A FEATURED SPEAKER AT MORGAN STANLEY'S November investment conference at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, Ferguson talked about the conflicting messages of the news and business sections of today's newspapers. "When you read the news section, you'd think the world is going to hell in a handcart," he said recently, recalling his remarks. "If you read the business section, you'd put the paper down thinking that life is as good as it could possibly get. All assets are up. All markets are liquid. All systems are go. The two sections don't seem to be describing the same world."
There are two possible explanations: "One is that the news section is exaggerating how dangerous the world is by focusing on spectacular but relatively unimportant events like the war in Iraq. Or, the financial pages are underestimating the potential impact on the market of a full-scale crisis in the Middle East."
EVEN ASIDE FROM HIS POLITICAL VIEWS, Ferguson doesn't wow everyone. One knock against him is that he spreads himself too thin with his academic work, speaking engagements, writing and TV series. He has been warning about geopolitical risk and investments for several years, and most markets have gone straight up. And though he may be an engaging speaker, his latest book on World War II, which weighed in at 880 pages, could have been more tightly edited.
Ferguson counters than he's no Cassandra, and that unlike a Wall Street economist or strategist, he's not in the prediction business. His message, simply, is that investors ought to strive for a better understanding of geopolitical risk, which he feels isn't captured in the black-box models and risk-mitigation strategies that are employed by sophisticated investors and trading firms around the world.
After his Lyford Cay talk, some attendees groused that Ferguson was too bearish; one told Steve Roach, the Morgan Stanley economist who helped organize the event, that the firm ought to do something upbeat this year, like screening the movie Mary Poppins. Not without wit, Ferguson later pointed out that one of key events in Mary Poppins was a bank failure.
Global Risks: An array of economic and political imbalances could upend the financial markets, Ferguson says.
Ferguson is intrigued by the behavior of the financial markets on the eve of World War I because stock and bond prices at the time registered scant concern about the impending cataclysm. This contrasts with the conventional view among historians that the war was all but preordained because of a decade of escalating great-power rivalries that erupted into violence after the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist in June 1914. If the smart money of that year was blind to looming disaster, perhaps the smart money of 2007 could be blind, too.
Ferguson was most surprised that the people who had more to lose from a war -- bond investors -- didn't see it coming. Investors had known since Napoleonic times that wars were inflationary and bad for bondholders, as World War I ultimately proved to be. Russian czarist debt was repudiated by the new Soviet government, while German debt was almost completely devalued by hyperinflation.
"If the origins of the First World War didn't have a financial dimension, what was going on?," he says. "In 1914, everyone knew that a war between Britain and Germany was possible. The popular press was full of it. But it's as if investors didn't want to factor that in until it was upon them. That's the analogy I'm trying to make. We might look back and say 'God, the origins of the Great Middle Eastern War of 2007 were very obvious.' "
Ferguson disagrees with those who believe history should be studied in a vacuum. "What we can learn from history is a way of arriving at a fuller set of potential problems or scenarios than we would be able to devise relying purely on our own experience," he says.