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Urban Edge Apartments | Apartment for sale in Brisbane Australia – LJ Hooker Dubai
Directions: http://goo.gl/maps/GxcQN LJ Hooker Dubai and Australia’s best known builders and developers PRADELLA, are proud to bring you “Urban Edge” Apartme… Continue reading
Emerging Markets Aren’t The Answer To Investors’ Woes
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e59381b4-d4d8-11e2-9302-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2X2Hjr9g5 By Merryn Somerset Webb Economic growth is no guarantee of returns to investors I’ve talked to a good few interesting people in the past week. But two are of particular interest at the moment. The first is David Stockman, author of The Great Deformation, The Corruption of Capitalism in America – a book that has been at the top of the bestseller lists in the US since it came out in April. The second is Dambisa Moyo, the almost impossibly glamorous author of, among other must-reads, How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and The Stark Choices Ahead. Both were – and I guess this is obvious – deeply pessimistic on the future of the US in particular. While their arguments are far from identical, they are both convinced that America, with its insistence on using monetary policy to mismanage interest rates and distort markets, along with its badly structured welfare state and low prioritisation of education, has a sad future ahead of it. Stockman was once director of the Office of Management and Budget in the US (under Ronald Reagan) and Moyo was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. So it is worth listening to both of them. I also happen to think they are mostly right. Politicians in the west, caught in traps set by their short electoral cycles, have made a nightmare series of bad decisions about public spending, the roles of the state and of course about what we should think of as money and how we should price that money. Then there’s the demographic profiles of western countries, with their growing numbers of older people; economies designed to grow on the back of consumer spending don’t grow much as their populations age and cut back spending. It is hard to see where a return to credit and baby-boomer style economic growth will come from. It is a lot easier to make up a good story about how emerging countries, with their lower debts and younger populations, will see fast economic growth than it is to come up with one about how the US will – although now there is the prospect of energy independence on the horizon, it is clearly getting a tad easier. But it’s a big step from being able to say that one group of countries will grow faster than another in gross domestic product terms to saying that you should expect stock markets in the faster-growing group to outperform the rest. Several studies have shown that this isn’t often true. The opposite very often is. Many explanations have been offered for this, but I suspect it comes down to the way the proceeds of growth are distributed at different stages of growth. When a country is growing fast, wages are most likely to be growing fast too – so more than you might expect goes to labour over capital. Rapid growth also gives companies one-off opportunities to build market share. If they take it, prioritising volume over margins, they won’t make much in the way of profits – possibly for many years. Then there are the many governance issues in emerging markets: state ownership, family-controlled companies, dodgy property rights and so on. These tend to ensure that the majority of the spoils can end up going to the minority of shareholders. If you look at it all like this, surely it would make sense to say that one should pay lower prices for companies based in emerging markets (as is the case in Russia, which I advocated recently), regardless of how fast it looks like those markets might grow. After all, you are taking more risks. There’s likely to be a long wait before the dividends start rolling in, and the longer you have to wait for something the higher the risk that you will never get it. We should pay a premium not for emerging market growth but for the kind of steadily rising profits and dividends we are more likely to get in the west. This is all something to bear in mind as you look at the carnage in emerging markets over the past week. Bonds, equities and currencies have all been clobbered. Investors who bought at high prices to get exposure to economic growth are now finding that there is something worse than paying a premium for the wrong thing. It’s not getting even that thing. So as the cheaper yen makes emerging market exports look less competitive, as China clearly slows down and the debate begins about the end of quantitative easing in the US, they are selling. But here’s one thing to note before you dismiss Asia and Latin America out of hand. One day, all the markets we now think of as emerging will be developed. They’ll turn their minds from all-out economic expansion to profits and at the same time their populations will demand proper governance and the odd dividend. Then their markets will soar. With that in mind, a nice little chart was slipped to me over a pub table by Tim Guinness of Guinness Funds a few months ago. It looks back at Japan’s economic growth and its stock market performance. The latter ran at 10 per cent or so a year from the early 1950s to the 1970s as the country industrialised and invested. In 1955 Japan had 5.2 cars per thousand people. By 1966 that number was 79. In 1970 it was 168. The stock market rose, but not in a particularly spectacular fashion. But around then, the Japanese economy shifted gear down to more like 5 per cent growth as the country entered a later industrial shift to a more consumption-based economy. Look at a chart of the Nikkei and you will see what happened next. It rose steadily throughout the 1970s and went completely nuts in the 1980s. So here’s something to think about. In 2000, China had 4.9 cars per 1,000 people. In 2012 it had 74. By 2016 – or maybe earlier – it should have close to 168. It should also have seen growth fall to 5 per cent or below. A few years before then might be good time to invest. Merryn Somerset Webb is editor in chief of MoneyWeek. The views expressed are personal. Continue reading
Capturing the plight of Syria’s refugees
Capturing the plight of Syria’s refugees Sarah Young / 23 June 2013 From an elderly woman forced to watch the murder of her husband, to the young man who suddenly finds himself a father of three — a new photography exhibition opening in Dubai this week hopes to open people’s eyes to the heartbreaking effects of civil war on the Syrian people. Victims of War, an exhibition featuring the work of Hermoine Macura, a Dubai-based Australian journalist who has worked in the Middle East for 12 years, will be on display at Pro Art Gallery from June 25. Macura said the non-political and non-governmental project, with its focus on highlighting humanitarian crises and suffering in Syria, was the hardest and most heart-breaking work she had done in the Middle East. The photos were taken in late December last year and early January, mainly at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, near the town of Masraq about 30 to 50 kilometres from Syria, where thousands of refugees were arriving daily, she said. “Children with special needs, people in wheelchairs, people having to be carried over the border, elderly…like a swarm through the sandstorms…imagine a sandstorm in Dubai times ten. You could barely see. “Some women were giving birth on the border with no medical care.” But what troubled her the most were the sexual and gender-based crimes against women. “Some women were tortured and raped with animals and rodents. Girls as young as 10, 11, 12 raped, tortured and mutilated. I have never seen such extreme cases of torture like this in the Middle East, even when I was in Iraq. Humanitarian organisations had to bring in psychologists and counsellors to deal with the trauma, she said. “The cultural shame and embarrassment attracted to (rape) made it very difficult for people to seek medical treatment…many were suffering in silence. “As an outsider it was just shocking. We don’t get to see how people really suffer. We get desensitised, and there’s nothing focused on highlighting this. It took a long time to digest what she had seen. “Every single person stays in my eyes, heart and mind. “When you see things like this, it makes you more sensitive to choosing diplomatic solutions over war…everyone is so quick to take that option (of war), especially when you live in priviledged societies where you’re safe and secure, but they don’t realise the consequences, the damage on generations of people and how it affects society as a whole. While those living in the UAE were blessed, people living in other parts of the Arab world were not. “I really don’t know what will happen to them. If you look at Iraq before the Gulf War, it was a very rich country, and if you go there now the Iraqi people are in poverty. A lot of women are turning to prostitution.” Eighty per cent of the refugees she saw were women and children. “In any situation of lawlessness, the women and children are going to suffer the most. “When you break the woman you break the society. She’s raising the children, holding everyone and the community together.” While she saw very few men, she could vividly recall one who had adopted the children of his two brothers who had been killed, and taken them across the border. “This was a single, unmarried man who was now a father of three children at 25 years old. He took these kids across the border and is now in a camp trying to plan or work out how do you move on from this.” Another face which stuck with her was that of a woman in her 80s. “Gangs came to her house. They killed her husband and burnt her house to the ground in front of her. She has nothing. She came across that border by herself. It was unusual to see elderly people being attacked in the Middle East, she said. “People work their whole lives for their home. Now she’s got nothing. She said ‘I can’t stay here because this is not my country. But there’s nothing for me at home either. I don’t know what to do’. “My camera man had to stop shooting because he was crying. It was so, so sad.” The two images that stuck with her the most, though, were of children. The first is of three disabled boys, standing in a desert storm trying to close their jackets with what was left of their arms. “They were like scarecrows on the rocks. To see young lives just blowing or withering in the wind…it was very disturbing. “This was the first project where I got to see how children and people with special needs suffered…there were not enough wheelchairs, kids had to sit on the floor or in a makeshift box with wheels.” The other image was of a little girl, about nine, outside a medical facility waiting for treatment. “It was the determination in her face…I felt that was a ray of hope. I could feel the spirit of the Syrian people in that young girl…who had come by herself, and was still holding it together. I just hope when people see these images they can see the humanitarian crisis, (but also) the people — that there is hope too, not just suffering.” The UN’s refugee agency UNHCR, medical staff, and volunteer camp workers, were doing an “amazing job”. “(UNHCR have) poured $1 million into refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. “Compared to what the Palestinians had to endure in the camps in Lebanon, this is really good. The shelters and tents are like little villages, housing more than 100,000 people. She said she was impressed with the high donations being made by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, even though the countries did not shout about it. Expert doctors also flew in every ten days from the Gulf states and some children were flown to GCC countries for specialised surgery, she said. “So in that darkness, there was some hope that came to light…some kids were born with a club foot but were so poor, or lived in such remote parts, they had never been able to be treated. And now they could be.” According to the UNHCR website, more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees are being hosted in foreign countries, with the majority in Lebanon and Jordan — and more than one million of those arrived in the first five months of 2013 alone. Women and children make up three-quarters of the refugee population. If current trends persisted, it could be expected that more than three million Syrians would have left their country by the end of this year, the website said. The exhibition will be going to Qatar and New York with all profits being donated to humanitarian organisations such as UNHCR. It opens at 7pm on June 25 and runs until July 15, at Pro Art Gallery in the Palm Strip Shopping Mall on Jumeirah Beach Road, Jumeirah 1. See www.victimsofwar.ae . sarah@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
