1 study trip down

Just finished my first trip to Hong Kong and what was a fairly tiring 4 days of lectures on Macroeconomics and the world finance system. I’m sure you can imagine the contents of the course were highly interesting given the current world economic climate. 

I think at the beginning of the course I was quite skeptical on what I was hearing, after all how could the world have let itself get into that bad a shape. But after countless graphs and statistics were pulled out to support the arguments one thing became very clear. The world is in serious economic trouble, the like of which has never been seen before.

I don’t really have time to go over everything I learnt in one blog post but I did want to mention two of my biggest misconceptions that have been corrected by the past few days. Firstly, that the worst of the sub primes were over…. scarily this simply isn’t true… many… many subprime mortgages are yet to reset… this means that the interest rate will jump from the ridiculously low starting rate, to market rate which quite frequently will cause the home owner to default which is what started this mess. 

Secondly, that the bailout was to save or purchase the toxic debt to take it off the books of the banks… this is also not true. The amount of debt tied up in the securities based on Sub-prime mortgages is simply gargantuan. The 700 billion dollars of this bailout won’t even scratch that debt, it is many many trillions of dollars. At the moment, the problem in the markets is that no-one is trading with each other, which is what is being referred to as a Liquidity crises. People may ask, so what? But without this activity whole economies cease to function, which yes.. means that everyone suffers. 

All that this bailout plan is attempting to achieve, is to kick start the markets again… to introduce sufficient capital that banks can lend to one another again and so that trading can recommence. Whether it will work, is still anyone’s guess.

I guess lastly… and this is more than two points I know… but lastly is just how bad the US economy is looking, its funny because over the past several years, the US economy has actually been experiencing reasonably strong growth…. BUT the wealth distribution from this growth has only been to the top 1% of US wage earners….. Who aren’t paying any TAX! As all there assets are stored in off-shore accounts!!! That means the deficit between the US and its trading partners has been steadily growing to the point at which the US economy will soon be bordering on insolvency. Given the rest of the world is based on the US dollar as its global currency this is an insanely scary thought. 

Anyway, not sure if much of this makes sense but I just wanted to share. Obama or McCain, the future for the economy at least doesn’t look too bright. And that is bad for everyone.