First published: Prospect, 24/08/2011
If, as an investor, you had been blessed with perfect foresight in early 2009, you might have made for the hills, armed with a suitcase of cash, a weapon, a tin helmet, and a stock of canned food. If the insurrections across north Africa and the Middle East, soaring energy prices, and rising inflation in emerging markets hadn’t put you off, you would have trembled at the aftershocks of the debt crisis. These have since included stop-start economic growth, budget cuts in the west, continuing falls in house prices. They also included an existential eurozone debt crisis and the rather meaningless decision by Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, to strip the US of its AAA credit rating. But if you had disengaged from financial markets at that point, you would have been dead wrong…..more
