Friday, January 4, 2008

2008 Gearing Up To Be A Bad Year

World stock markets opened the first week of trading at their worst start in a long long time.

The stock market is considered to be the barometer of the economy. Therefore, if you want to know what will happen for the rest of the year, you need not look farther than the performance of any stock market index.

You wonder why stocks of companies like Megaworld, Metrobank, Banco De Oro, and Ayala Corporation have been beaten black and blue. They're solid companies with proven profitability records, yet their stock movements clearly don't reflect that.

The subprime crisis in the US has affected the credit markets the world over. Our local banks are rumored to have exposure to asset backed securities, securities linked to the subprime mess. The peso , which appreciated the entire 2007, proved to be a bane for OFWs and some BPO locators here. OFWs comprise a big chunk of the real estate buyers in the domestic market.

This year's a leap year. One added day of misery in my books.

Be mindful of your finances this year. I have business friends and they tell me last December wasn't like the previous Decembers of years past. In short, business actually fell year on year. Remember my blog entry about the peso appreciating so much that it started to hurt OFWs and local consumer spending? Well, if my friends' remarks are any indication, it's the start of slackening growth.

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