As often happens when I’m invited onto a radio programme I don’t always end up talking about what was settled upon in the original agenda!
Last week, on ‘The Mooney Show’, I had two topics to discuss – inertia, and how it can prevent people from taking important personal financial decisions.
The other was a ‘positive’ money topic – the huge wealth opportunities there are for in the Far East and other developing economies.
Time passes quickly on the radio, so I barely got a chance to mention the latter topic, mainly because we kept returning to my belief that all this talk of the end of the recession and ‘recovery’ is a load of hokum. That said, this downturn is not happening everywhere.
In other parts of the world – like India, China and Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea, south-east Asia, Brazil, Chile and Australia and New Zealand, there is genuine growth and profit-making.
Incomes are rising and so is domestic consumption as people lift themselves out of poverty and then join the expanding middle class.
With the exception of Australia and New Zealand, these are also countries unburdened – so far – by huge expensive social welfare or entitlement programmes. There is plenty of bureaucracy and corruption, but not the deadening levels of state regulation.
Countries like capitalist China and India are being described now as the 21st century versions of 19th century America, a century of huge progress and potential, of innovation, entrepreneurship, and national wealth creation – however rough and ready it may appear to our western socialist sensibilities.
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