Re: [A-List] Re: An era of collapse

[bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

G'day Sabri,

> Tell Jon Flanders that he forgot me and my Australian friend Rob
> Schaap.

I reckon we can add several Japanese banks (if memory serves, Kenichi
Ohmae thinks we're talking between one and two trillion dollars-worth of
bad debt).   Then we can add whoever's gonna cop it worst when a fortune
in Japanese money deserts Wall St to cover the cracks back home, US
equities take a dive, margin calls ring throughout the land, and bad
debt numbers duly climb Stateside.

Um, and then there's China's whole financial system.  The Sydney Morning
Herald <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/18/biztech/biztech17.html> tells
of an Ernst & Young study that finds bad debt amounts to 44% of China's
output (ie 44% of US$1.08 trillion.  That's proportionately an awful lot
worse even than the nightmare in Tokyo.  Wonder what a radically
devalued Yuan (I know Beijing says that ain't gonna happen, but then
Buenos Aires said that not so long ago, too) would do to SE Asian
exporters?

And then there's Brazil, which has just got to be feeling some of
Argentina's pain.  The Brazilian economy is muchly integrated with
Argentina's - Brazilian assets there are depreciating, and Argentinian
investments in Brazil are returning home apace.  And then there's large
chunks of Germany's industry, which owns most of suddenly mayorless Sao
Paolo ...

And one suspects a few insurers/reinsurers are hurting, too.  Maybe some
of them will go the way of Australia's biggest insurer/reinsurer, HIH,
which went belly-up without notice a couple of months ago.  Our second
biggest airline (Ansett) and our third-biggest telecom (OneTel) went at
around the same time, so Australia is certainly contributing its whack
to this orgy of system-righting capital destruction.

Ah, the genius of capitalism, eh?

Stuff's gonna be a whole lot different this time next year ...

By which time I hope to have paid for the elctrics in my car, which just
broke down at 4.00 in the morning on a dirt road in the middle of
nowhere ...

Bearhugs to all,
Rob.