While economists quibble, the world's richest man has decided:
the United States is already in recession. So Warren Buffett tells
German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview to be published on
Monday.
Buffett, the 77-year-old chief of the Berkshire Hathaway holding
company, blamed financial institutions for introducing instruments
"they can no longer control" and said the "genie can no longer be
put back in the bottle."
Buffett, who overtook Bill Gates this year as the world's
richest man, said he believed the financial markets should be more
tightly regulated.
According to the Forbes annual billionaire's list published in
March, Buffett saw his wealth jump from 52 billion dollars last
year to 62 billion, pushing Microsoft co-founder Gates into third
position after 13 years at the top.
US economic growth has slowed dramatically in recent months and
a growing number of economists believe the world's largest economy
will experience a recession during 2008 amid a housing slump and
related credit crunch."
Our GIC and Temasek CEO, PM, MM, SM have much to learn from such
guru who have been more effective in investing monies than any one
else on this planet.
Moral of the story : Wealth creation is not to be left to any
gut feel or pure economists or financial institutions alone as they
failed because they were too over-confident of their instruments
like hedging or rates or yields without looking at bigger
fundamentals at work.
MM Lee appears to play with the theory that what come down will
always go up. In a different cup what is down may only stay at the
bottom and not come up e.g. Citbank is becoming technically
bankrupt and it is now realized it is quite wrong in his predicting
it is the chance for Singapore to get to invest in it and lose more
billions.