It might have been the Republican shutdown (according to one person at the White House, at least). It might have been the fault of the Syrian leader Bachar Al-Assad gassing his people with chemical weapons.
What would you do in the country that has only 4% of its population that earns more than $5 per day to eke out its existence if you wanted to sell in that country?
France’s General de Gaulle once said that the only thing that would unite Europe would be China. At the time he was probably visionary in the knowledge that the Europeans would never unite.
When the US shutdown sent shivers and ripples through the financial markets in October with the fear that the federal government would end up defaulting on the repayment of its debts, the banks decided to set up contingency plans.
In a few years’ time we might all be whining because there is no more water left in the world apparently. That’s because according to the World Economic Forum “we are now on the verge of water bankruptcy in many places around the world, with no clear way of repaying the debt”.
The EU may have many worries and woes that are slapping it around its face right now (and it could be said for a number of years), but there is one thing that is worrying economists more than the sovereign-debt crisis and that’s the fact that prices are not increasing enough.
When the US federal government was shutdown, China jumped in on the financial bandwagon and suggested that we build ‘a de-Americanized world’, which boils down to getting rid of the dollar as the international reserve currency.
President Obama, the US federal government shutdown, the omnipotence of the National Security Agency and the anger of the world at just how much the USA flouts the laws that we thought we might have lived by.
While some harp on about the growing dangers of yet another housing bubble in the western world, there are other more important things perhaps that are going on in other countries in the world.
Just a few days ago Alan Greenspan’s latest piece of work was published (October 20th 2013). It’s entitled The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting.
