Markets are in flux, and there is a tendency amid the shifting tide to see the current flowing against Europe and toward the US as the dollar recovers against a newly ailing Euro. This is a myopic view, one that fails to recognise that this trend is less a turning of tables than an outcome of the fact that the US is now at last dragging the rest of the G7 down with it. We have entered a dangerous phase of the financial crisis, from the shifting of wealth to the destruction of wealth. Economists now say this year looks set to become one of the worst for financial assets since the 1940s, with both equities and bonds losing value. The expanding wave of defaults by US homeowners has now hit credit unions, among the most risk-averse lenders, illustrating how the crisis has spread from the shakiest debtors to the most creditworthy. Not only are potential home buyers finding it difficult to get loans, but students are finding it hard to find anyone willing to finance the exorbitant cost of higher education - a trend that could have a deep and long-lasting impact on US competitiveness.
Commodity prices, including oil, are in retreat amid signs that emerging market demand will not compensate for the decline in demand from the developed world as the slump worsens. The broad retreat from risk is supporting a rally by the dollar, but comes at the cost of emerging market stock prices. The dollar's rally is simultaneously exacerbating oil's decline. This is helping to ease inflationary pressures, reducing for Asian exporters and the Gulf the sense of urgency surrounding the need to revalue their currencies.
Commodity prices appear likely to remain high, however much they may drop in the next few weeks. Subsidies and price controls ensure that demand remains inelastic to global price swings. Currency revaluations remain necessary, and social unrest is the ultimate price some countries will pay for failing to respond to inflation fast enough. Nations like China and India need to accelerate the liberalisation of their economies, reducing subsidies and the distortions they are creating. President Bush is in China hammering on human rights issues. But he ought to be hammering on China's need to cut its subsidisation of oil. China needs to do this to enable the efficient and more rapid transition of its economy from export-driven to one relying on the demand of a new middle class being created by its rapid development and investment in new infrastructure and more efficient, less pollutive production.
Russia's invasion of Georgia underscores the inherent volatility of the new world we are entering. Whatever the war there may do to end oil's decline, it will remind traders of the high risk amid tight supplies of an event shock to global supplies. More broadly, the war is the culmination of Russia's new assertiveness, and part of a resource nationalism that is spreading rapidly across a world of increasingly scarce natural resources. Worse, it demonstrates a deteriorating sense of global co-ordination on economic problems, one that the breakdown of the Doha Round also helped to illustrate.
For those who moved to the Gulf hoping to find shelter from the storm, it may start seeming strangely breezy. You may run from a global financial crisis, but unfortunately you cannot hide. @Email:warnold@thenational.ae
