The litany of dire predictions for currencies, commodities and the global economy in general not only seems endless - it is getting more predictable by the day. That is because few pundits are making any waves - or money - out of playing Pollyanna, as everyone from Jim Rogers to Nouriel Roubini well know.
While it’s an increasingly safe bet for analysts to leap on the gloom’n'doom bandwagon, there are a handful of analysts out there who get taken more seriously than most - as opposed to herds of kneejerk Cassandras who have shelved their usually bland reports to start warning that the “western banking system is imploding”; “the US is on the brink”; “Europe is melting down”; “China is going down the toilet”; “Japan is already down in the S-bend” etc etc.
Among them, CLSA’s equity strategist Christopher Wood can rightly claim to have been more prescient than most of his ilk - warning some years ago about the consequences of exploding US mortgage securitisation and more specifically, about the growth of subprime lending. In his often colourful newsletter, Greed & Fear (which sadly we no longer receive), Wood has been banging on about everything from warning signs in the Baltic Dry Index for commodities prices to Britain’s banana republic tendencies long before it was vogueish to do so. As a result, he has been consistently rated among the top equity strategists on Asia and last year was billed by the Wall Street Journal as “the man who saw it [the subprime mortgage crisis] coming”.
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