Tuesday, December 21, 2010

World Stock Markets Rally to Pre-Lehman Levels

The Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) World Stock Market Index reached a 27-month high today of 1271.278.  This was the highest closing index value for world stock markets since September 19, 2008 in the wake of Lehman Brothers' filing for bankruptcy on September 15, and the subsequent financial meltdown caused the MSCI World Index to drop below 700 by March 2009 (see chart).  It's a significant milestone that world stock markets have now returned to their pre-Lehman levels.   

3 Comments:

At 12/22/2010 12:38 PM, Blogger Buddy R Pacifico said...

This is huge news but U.S. financial sites that I look at don't seem to think so.

MarketWatch.com, SeekingAlpha,com and YahooFinance.com do not highlight this achievment at all.

The U.S. is still very econcentric but even the average person, with 401K(B) investments or college saving accounts, would be well served to note the MSCI index.

It is interesting that the U.S. still does not have much interest in a global perspective in these other areas: the metric system; learning other languages; or aligning the national tax system to the competitive global marketplace.

 
At 12/22/2010 12:42 PM, Blogger Buddy R Pacifico said...

The first line of my comment should read:

This is huge new but otherfinancial sites I look at don't seem to think so.

 
At 12/22/2010 1:00 PM, Blogger Benjamin Cole said...

Americans think the world revolves them, a perspective constantly refreshed by our foreign policy-military archipelago and its PR machine and minions.

There are great investment opps throughout the Far East, where a boom is taking place that will ultimately dwarf anything that happened in the USA.


The only risk I see is that the Communist Party still controls China, and indeed controls majority voting shares of all public companies in China (a fact not revealed in Western prospectuses).

Without allocation of resources by price, China may collapse the way the Soviet Union did. Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. What would happen in China after a collapse it hard to tell--free enterprise, or even more state control?

Still, my sense is that the future is in the Far East. Invest there and move there if you can.

The USA is sinking under a subsidized rural economy, a huge military parasite complex, a mandarin class of lawyers and litigants, and huge welfare classes of all kinds. To top it off, we have mediocre governance, and a Fed that may strangle growth through too-tight money (ala Japan).

Tough choices out there.

 

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