Tuesday 4 November 2008

Revision of "When Markets Collide"

The book "When Markets Collide" talks about not only about an essential economics problem of the present and future but also based on the author`s experience, explained how to deal with those noises and take care of it.
It was at the end of 1997, when Mohamed, currently one of the most respected economic and financial analysts, left (IMF) and joined the opportunity of witnessing the clear transformation of the global economy.
In this book, it talks about the "transformation" of the global economy. "Transformation" which affect the World we living in, is really hard to navigate and observe since it comes from not expected place with rapid speed. The thing is that with the technologies that we have now, we can not perfectly solve the problem no matter how early stage we navigate the transformation, but we can minimize the effect on us which will be in the present and in the future.
To find out the motives of the transformation, we have to recognize the "noise" which normally comes out anomalies to that participants take for granted. But the normal reaction of people around the World towards this "noise" is just ignoring it. But sensitive people like Edward and Mohamed, they listened carefully and watched other people`s views to find out where the "initial noise" coming from, and what effect would this put on the World that we are living in.
Most of investors, rather than waiting and having a careful look about their decisions and investments, they just became full steam and take more risk which they do not know anything about. But the thing is that even though policy makers know the fact of what is going and they show discomfort of this, they actually can not do anything about it. So investors became "data dependent" which is that they just go after data without robust analytical anchors, so there is big problem if there is big turnaround against the data that they believed in.

Here are 3 main factors of helping to explaining the "noise"
  1. Fundamental realignment of global economic power and influence.
  2. Pronounced accumulation of financial wealth by a set of countries which used to be more debtors than creditors.
  3. Proliferation of new financial instruments that have deeply changed the barriers of entry to many markets.
The problems of today is that the economy is keep changing in a rapid rate and investor who have no idea what is going just jump into the sea. And the pipe can not handle both new and old problems together at the same time.

There is another thing that have been changed in a recent years, the reputation of developing countries, before they are not used be even considered among the markets of developed countries, but now they are the big supporters of the market issue since they invest lots of money on things which developed countries can not do because of the danger.

1 comment:

chris sivewright said...

Three days, no blog = USELESS

No books returned = DOUBLE USELESS