Monday 23 November 2009

Warning Signals... "The survival Of The Fittest"

From a reliable source to another that is not... lets try to express the uncertainties that are currently taking place.

The reliable source is certainly the ECB that have started to send "clear" signals to the market. You could try to decipher their "secret code" or what are the messages that the policy makers are trying to send in order to influence the market participants i.e the investors - the profesional one (the amators are being misled by newspapers such as Kaupaleti or Helsanginsonomat and YLET (*)).

So the ECB last article is worth its weight on gold (when you know that gold price start to enter into a bubble mode...)
"The US and other advanced countries would exit last, as their economies are proving to be the slowest to recover. This would be the ideal sequence.

...Unfortunately, the reality appears to be quite different. Emerging Asian economies have not yet exited and do not seem to be in the mood to exit first, despite the stronger pace of their recovery, at least compared with that of the US..."

"The consequences of a late exit strategy have not been sufficiently examined. A delayed exit aims at increasing the incentives to lend at (low) fixed rates. But the more the exit is delayed, the greater the adjustment will have to be when interest rates are ultimately increased, in order to catch up. And the greater the interest rate adjustment, the larger the capital loss to fixed income asset holders."

Note that they are clearly syaing that the emerging market are currently making a mistake by not exiting from their current extraordinary policy measures. To that extent one can say that the next wave is currently developping under our eyes, a massive overheating of the emerging market (China, India, Latin America and indirectly Russia).

Obviously this is caused by the fact that interest rates are incredibly low in developped country (US around zero and Euro zone around 1%)...so money is flowing into emerging market. So we could be entering in an exception and turbulent period. And it is not clear whether the developed country (US and Euro zone) are creating in order to fullfill the following paradigm "the survival of the Fittest".

Another interesting point is the stress that interest rates will have to be increased on time, a failure to delay such a move (as the hyperinflationnary camps thinks) will have painfull consequences such as increasing interest rates to a very high level and during a longer that wished period.

The big question is again about "timing" and obviously the current state might change for the best or the worse in the next few months or years , so the need to monitor those developments.

Ok to be consistent with my introduction, here is the not so credible source:
"Pekkarinen says that stronger stimulus measures would help avert an interest rate trap and improve employment.
...
He notes that stimulus is one of the few options that Finland has to turn its economy upward in synch with the rest of the EU and avert an interest rate trap."
They will use any mean to use tax payer money that will be purely wasted (except for political purpose) as the finnish economy is fully dependent of the external world (even more as time goes) so no stimulus could replace that. However it could, at best, on a temporary basis (1-2 years), smooth the rise of unemployment and stabilize the strengh of the deterioration to an acceptable level (;->, can't help it might be due to the bad weather...) .

(*) spelling mistakes were mysteriously made by the spellchecker...

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