Corporate profits in the US down - more than half the top 500 companies there are reporting declining profits, and Wall St must be looking beyond America's shores for solace. So what does it see? In Russia, interest rates are now at 150%, as Yeltzin tries desperately to protect the rouble to avoid the SE Asian nightmare, and he's also slashing public expenditure - more millions without their salaries and unable to borrow. Local businesses coming to a grinding halt, and an almost totalitarian leadership, without logical successor, is on the brink. Foreign capital is fleeing at an ever increasing rate. In China, Beijing is rethinking its self-integration into world markets. The transition costs are gonna be huge, tens of millions of life-long socialists are about to be fired, and SE Asia's desperate economies are exporting anything anybody'll buy at very competitive prices due to unprecedented low currencies. Hong Kong's plight might be symptomatic of this uncertainty. It is about to announce its first 'negative growth' in more than a decade - its stock market is also at a ten-year low.. South Korea is on strike (in fact revitalised workers' organisations are digging in their heels all over the place) - and its markets have plunged to 313 - their lowest in more than a decade. Japan's yen is beginning to creak, as the pound, the dollar and the mark all begin to make significant gains against it - SE Asia looks on in impotent despair. They need an importing Japan, but unfortunately Japan needs to export its way back to health. This can't be good for the US's persistent current account deficit neither. India is contemplating a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan's nuclear plant and gawd only knows what China is contemplating vis India's nuclear plant. Indonesia has a government incapable of answering the questions so pithily asked of Soeharto - and the trouble with a finance sector largely owned by family and friends is that, when you leave office, everybody rushes to get their money out of those institutions. And that run intensified today. Denmark is threatening to start a Europe-wide rethinking of the new Europe. French socialists have passed the 35-hour week - planting seeds of new ambition in the heads of workers throughout the continent. Germany looks destined for social democracy, and only creative accounting has qualified several countries for the already unpopular Euro. The MAI has hit the wall. Oh, and poor little Oz's dollar is floating like a brick. I predict some cheap Porsches may be had at local second-hand dealers well before Chrissie. Why am I wrong? Yours in tentative schadenfreude, Rob.
