MarketVVizard's Market Thoughts

Top 780. Jan 11, 2004 7:21 PM

» MarketVVizard - Re: Re: Latest From Bill Gross

In response to message posted by azxcvbnm:

Heh, yes, there's definitely a big hole in BG's commentary on that point. Besides the "big" one, a gold standard, there are the equally big factors of massive federal budget deficits, a massive trade deficit, and massive accumulated debt (including future obligations). Not to mention that for some of those older years there was no Fed, no organized banking system, no banking insurance, no Social Security, no welfare, low income taxes, etc. Without a doubt, it certainly SEEMS like rates SHOULD be higher. But that is not to say that REAL rates (i.e. inflation adjusted) should be...

I haven't really come to any firm convictions on this matter yet. I've vacillated a few times. I honestly would not be surprised by anything with regards to future direction of US interest rates. Many fundamentals say they should go higher along with inflation, but the flip side factors are also noteworthy including the deflationary pressures of the next inevitable recession as well as the "mysterious Fed factor" -- meaning, does anyone really know if they can or can't artificially keep rates down (both short and long)?

-- posted by MarketVVizard

Top 781. Jan 11, 2004 8:02 PM

» Normxxx - Re: Re: Re: Latest From Bill Gross

In response to message posted by MarketVVizard:

And have you factored in the collapse of the debt and/or derivatives markets? And the collapse of the international economy when the dollar finally collapses?

Hell, if God could create the universe out of nothing, why can't Greenspan create prosperity out of nothing? But what happens after Greenspan? I understand Rubin is pessimistic these days.

-- posted by Normxxx

Top 782. Jan 11, 2004 11:55 PM

» azxcvbnm - Re: Re: Re: Re: Latest From Bill Gross

In response to message posted by Normxxx:

Normxxx, I've read a few doomsday scenarios, but none of them seem plausible at all. A collapse of the dollar, and thus the international economy, would be a collapse of capitalism itself. Capitalism is dependent on consumption, as without consumption, there can be no production, and no jobs (exactly what happened during the Great Depression). It is in no country's interest to see that happen, but I don't think anyone could force the collapse of the dollar anyway, since there is no alternative. What would they use as currency, sea shells? Gold again? But gold is just as arbitrary, and limited so the world economies would have to contract and pretty much be destroyed in the process. Why not just accept dollars since the alternatives are much worse?

Plus there are self-correcting mechanisms in place. Other countries can force US interest rates higher by simply not purchasing US GOV. Bonds and buying real US assets like property, US companies, or even gold on the free market. This will cause property and asset price inflation, and without foreign purchases, US Bond Yields would soar. The FED would have to raise rates to battle inflation, thus shrinking credit and stopping the overprinting of currency.

The reason why we don't see this is because the world still demands US dollars, and even this massive creation of dollars is only enough to satisfy demand. That's because the US Dollar is the fiat currency of the world and MUST expand as the world economy expands. For example, take a closed system with a $10,000 car, and $10,000 in dollars. Now if another car is produced, $10,000 of currency must be created to represent that car, or else we'd get deflation (two cars, but still only $10,000 Dollars). We'd only see inflation if currency creation outstrips real output of cars. Thanks to China's incredible economic expansion, we are able to create all these dollars without inflation. Now China is already beginning to overheat, but money supply topped out months ago. Could the FED really be that wise and ominscent? I hope. I'd like to believe that if I can think of this line of reasoning, then a group of experts with more information at their disposal could too.

-- posted by azxcvbnm

Top 783. Jan 12, 2004 7:49 AM

» MarketVVizard - Barron's "The Real Deal"

I don't have the online subscription so I can't post the Barron's article, but I thought the piece on "How FDR's New Deal prolonged Great Depression unemployment" was worth reading. I have talked about this in the past. For some reason (I'm sure its politically motivated) historians today and the public education system almost worship FDR. The reality is quite different from the popular image. I was talking to someone who lived though the Depression recently, and she was talking about FDR. She mentioned that FDR changed the day for Thanksgiving, "we didn't know a president could do that" she joked. I said, "FDR did a LOT of things we didn't know a president could do" with a smile...

Jim Powell wrote the article in this week's Barrons. He is also author of the recent book "FDR's Folly". This is NOT the Barron's piece, but it is something that Jim has written in the past:
_______________________________________
Fresh Debate About FDR's New Deal
by Jim Powell

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, (Crown Forum, 2003).

It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression of the 1930s -- perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and it's still controversial, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment that averaged 17 percent.

Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson acknowledged that if World War II hadn't come along, America might have stumbled through many more years of double-digit unemployment. Samuelson, however, is among those who give FDR high marks for handling the political crisis of the 1930s, the worst political crisis this country has faced since the Civil War.

But the political crisis was caused by the double-digit unemployment, and in my new book, FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003), I report mounting evidence developed by dozens of economists, at Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California (Berkeley) and other universities, that double-digit unemployment was prolonged by FDR's own New Deal policies.

How can that be? Consider just a few of FDR's policies. The New Deal tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940 -- excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, dividend taxes, excess profits taxes all went up, and FDR introduced an undistributed profits tax. A number of New Deal laws, including some 700 industrial cartel codes, made it more expensive for employers to hire people, and this discouraged hiring.

Frequent changes in the tax laws plus FDR's anti-business rhetoric ("economic royalists") discouraged people from making investments essential for growth and jobs. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. FDR issued antitrust lawsuits against some 150 employers and companies, making it harder for them to focus on business. FDR signed a law ordering the break-up of America's strongest banks, with the lowest failure rates. New Deal farm policies destroyed food -- 10 million acres of crops and 6 million farm animals -- thereby wiping out farm jobs and forcing food prices above market levels for 100 million American consumers. FDR's Folly spells out much more in startling, sometimes hilarious detail.

Robert Bartley, who edited the Wall Street Journal for three decades and is now a commentator, called for a fresh debate about the New Deal. Newspaper publisher Conrad Black, author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, responded by claiming that if "workfare" recipients were included among the "employed," then New Deal unemployment rates were lower than the U.S. Department of Labor has reported for decades. Those tempted to agree with Black might listen to jazz great Louis Armstrong's 1940 tune "The WPA" -- referring to FDR's biggest "workfare" program, the Works Progress Administration. Among the memorable lines: "Sleep while you work, rest while you play, lean on your shovel to pass the time away, at the WPA."

There's a fascinating split between economists and political historians about the New Deal. The idea that FDR cured double-digit unemployment, wrote author and commentator Thomas Sowell in a recent column, "was never pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon -- criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the depression."

Meanwhile, pro-FDR political historians such as James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, William Leuchtenburg, and Kenneth S. Davis, have focused on the personalities, elections, speeches, "Fireside Chats" and other aspects of the New Deal's political story, disregarding evidence about the economic consequences of New Deal policies. This continues to be the case with younger political historians like Alan Brinkley, author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War, who called the New Deal "a bright moment." Disregarding the economic consequences, too, are children's book authors like Joy Hakim, whose recent bestseller Freedom: A History of US includes a glowing account of New Deal heroics.

Aside from FDR's Folly, the only major work mentioning evidence about the economic consequences of the New Deal is by Stanford University political historian David M. Kennedy: his 1999 book Freedom from Fear, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. "Whatever it was," he wrote, the New Deal "was not a recovery program." The New Deal might be gone, but the debate goes on.

-- posted by MarketVVizard

Top 784. Jan 12, 2004 8:31 AM

» Austrian - Re: Barron's "The Real Deal"

In response to message posted by MarketVVizard:

From Barron's

The Real Deal

How FDR's New Deal prolonged Great Depression unemployment
By JIM POWELL

THE NEW DEAL IS STILL WIDELY VIEWED as a good model for what government should do in an economic crisis. General Wesley Clark opened his campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination by admiringly invoking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, launched in 1933 as a response to the Great Depression. Other Democratic presidential hopefuls also talk reverentially about the New Deal.

Like many Americans, these Democrats admire FDR for his charisma, his personal triumph over polio, and his leadership during World War II, but mounting evidence suggests that FDR actually prolonged unemployment, which averaged 17% during the New Deal era (1933-1940), despite some economic growth. The evidence was developed by dozens of economists -- including two Nobel Prize winners -- at some of the nation's top universities.

This evidence has been steadfastly ignored by almost all political historians -- even when writing about the Great Depression, the most important economic event in 20th-century American history, if not all American history. The first and still the only major political historian to acknowledge some of this evidence was Stanford University's David M. Kennedy, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Freedom From Fear (1999). "Whatever it was," Kennedy wrote, the New Deal "was not a recovery program." Here are some highlights of the growing body of evidence:

The New Deal tripled taxes. Federal tax revenue tripled from $1.6 billion in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940, and as a percentage of gross national product, federal taxes more than doubled. Key sources of New Deal revenue were excise taxes levied on alcohol, cigarettes, matches, candy, chewing gum, margarine, fruit juice, soft drinks, cars, tires, telephone calls, movie tickets, playing cards, electricity, radios and other things bought by ordinary people. Until 1937, New Deal revenue from excise taxes exceeded the combined revenue from both personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. It wasn't until 1942, during World War II, that income taxes exceeded excise taxes for the first time under FDR. So the New Deal was substantially financed on the backs of the middle class and poor people.

The New Deal made it harder for employers to raise capital, without helping investors to do better. FDR's securities legislation required that employers follow costly, time-consuming procedures before issuing securities. The volume of new stock issues, when the market revived, was lower than it had been before the Securities & Exchange Commission was established (1934). George J. Stigler (University of Chicago) and Gregg A. Jarrell (University of Rochester) reported that SEC regulations failed to improve the rate of return from new stock issues. Among other things, this means alleged stock-market fraud couldn't have been significant before the SEC came along, since fraud reduces rates of return. So FDR's securities legislation didn't help employers, investors or unemployed people.

The New Deal broke up the strongest banks. FDR thought "universal" banks (engaging in both commercial banking and investment banking) had something to do with the Depression-era bank failures, so he signed the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) mandating the break-up of these banks into pure commercial banks and pure investment banks. Eugene White (Rutgers University) analyzed the failure rates of different types of banks, and he reported that universal banks -- the banks broken up -- were the strongest banks. Incidentally, FDR's federal deposit insurance (the FDIC, launched in 1933) didn't stop bank failures -- it just transfers the cost of bank failures to taxpayers when there are bailouts. Some 90% of bank failures occurred because of unit banking laws limiting banks to just one office, thereby making it tough for small rural banks to diversify their loan portfolios or sources of deposits. FDR did nothing about these laws.

The New Deal discouraged investment essential for private-sector job creation. FDR's frequent tax hikes (1933-36) made it harder for investors to estimate investment risk. FDR told businesses how much to pay people, how much they must charge for their products, how much to produce, and where they could and could not sell them. FDR began 150 antitrust lawsuits, very few of which were sustained. He denounced investors as "economic royalists," "privileged princes" and "economic dictators," leading many to believe that investing in business enterprise was unsafe. No wonder private investment was at historically low levels during the New Deal era.

The New Deal channeled government spending away from the poorest people. Most New Deal spending went to political "swing" states in the West and East, where incomes were at least 60% higher than in America's poorest region, the South. FDR, pursuing his self-interest as an incumbent, spent money where it was most likely to gain new votes. The South received comparatively little, because Southern voters were already overwhelmingly on FDR's side.

The New Deal made it more expensive for employers to hire people. The National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), National Labor Relations Act (1935) and Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) were among the New Deal laws forcing wages above market levels. Naturally, when the price of something goes too high, demand tends to go down. The resulting New Deal unemployment hurt poor people especially hard. In 2001, David E. Bernstein (George Mason University) estimated that 500,000 African-Americans lost jobs because of the National Industrial Recovery Act alone; as Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway of Ohio University report, New Deal policies "raised wages and labor costs" -- which caused many of those mills to close.

The New Deal forced up the cost of living in the worst of times. During the Depression, Americans desperately needed bargain prices, but FDR promoted higher prices. In an effort to raise farm incomes, FDR forced up food prices by paying farmers to destroy crops when millions were hungry, and then he paid farmers to not to grow anything on a portion of their land. All this made food more expensive for the three-quarters of Americans (about 100 million) who weren't farmers. The National Industrial Recovery Act outlawed discounting, and people were jailed for selling at prices below levels mandated in some 700 New Deal cartel codes. The Anti-Chain Store Act (1936) made it illegal for chain stores like the A&P to buy goods in volume, get great discounts and pass savings to consumers. The Retail Price Maintenance Act (1937) promoted price fixing for general merchandise.

The New Deal promoted public works projects that backfired. The biggest of these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government power monopoly exempt from state and federal taxes and regulations. William U. Chandler (Johns Hopkins University) reported that since 1940, non-TVA southern states have generally experienced faster growth in employment and income than TVA southern states. Even though TVA electricity was subsidized by the 98% of taxpayers who didn't live in the Tennessee Valley, it was still more expensive than oil or natural gas for home heating. The TVA flooded more land (behind the dams) than it saved (below the dams), dispossessing more than 15,000 people including impoverished black sharecroppers. Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny (University of Tennessee) reported that "TVA's 'social experiment' was a failure."

The last thing we need is another New Deal. What people need is for government to cut taxes, cut spending, cut through thickets of regulations, provide stable money, let people enjoy bargains and get out of the way so that free markets -- and the job market -- can flourish.

--------------------------------------------------
JIM POWELL, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003).

-- posted by Austrian

Top 785. Jan 12, 2004 9:08 AM

» Normxxx - Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Latest From Bill Gross

In response to message posted by azxcvbnm:

I don't necessarily disagree with you and I hope you're right (at least until I go on to my unjust reward). I (along with John Mauldin) am a great believer in the "just muddle through" school of economics. Plausible (if not credible) doomsday scenerios have been around all of my adult life, but never seem to quite happen.

Nevertheless, I was born into a poor family in the Great depression, and I lived through the Great inflation and stock market fiasco (where the stock market lost about 90% in real dollars) of the '70s.

Those were serious enough for me, and I hope to avoid them in the near future.

-- posted by Normxxx

Top 786. Jan 12, 2004 11:22 AM

» Normxxx - Why The Market Crashed in 2000. . .And Why It Will Again.

In response to message posted by azxcvbnm:

How the Boomers Lost Their Way in the Bubble full text

By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr. | January 11, 2004

'T ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble," Mark Twain once said. "It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Millions of investors, ignorant of financial history, were taught expensive lessons when they eagerly absorbed the new conventional wisdom of the 1990's. Most prominent of those new certainties was the notion that stocks were the only sensible securities. Bonds, after all, provided neither double-digit annual returns nor cocktail-party cachet.

The responsible baby boomer, frightened by Wall Street promoters and unduly cynical about receiving Social Security, came to regard a heavy commitment to stocks as crucial to any chance of prospering and then maintaining a decent standard of living in retirement.

The main corollaries of stock pre-eminence were that you should buy more shares whenever prices dropped, and that you should hold on to them practically forever.

Weren't these the methods of Warren E. Buffett, the iconic sage of Omaha, whose net worth from investing runs to 11 digits?

The stock implosion that shattered these illusions in early 2000 resulted from a combination of forces. Not least of these was the belief in an Internet-based new era, a premise that anybody familiar with financial history should have found highly suspect.

In her highly readable and insightful "Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982-1999" (HarperBusiness, $27.95), Maggie Mahar exposes the ignorance, myths and avarice that surrounded the fin de siècle market bubble and subsequent bust. The book is an account not only of a swarm of naïve stock buyers but also of Wall Street hyperpromoters, greedy corporate executives, careerist mutual fund managers, complaisant accountants and company directors, beholden politicians and too many uncritical journalists swept up in the stock-buying frenzy. It also tells of misjudgment by the Securities and Exchange Commission and an error or two by the Federal Reserve.

In the process, Ms. Mahar, a financial journalist who was a senior writer for Barron's, makes a devastating case against the contention that the market is almost perfectly efficient - that prices are the product of immediate, judicious weighing of all available information by rational investors. She quotes Robert J. Shiller, the prescient Yale economist, who declared this hypothesis "the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory."

[Normxxx Here: He, who is ignorant of history, is doomed to repeat it. ]

-- posted by Normxxx

Top 787. Jan 13, 2004 6:00 AM

» lcha - Re: The Illusion of Prosperity

In response to message posted by Normxxx:

Thought this was fitting under the "Illusion of Prosperity" banner

Trimming fat a mere drop in bucket of entitlements
By SCOTT BURNS

My recent declaration of enmity for the AARP because it supports the $6 trillion prescription drug benefit was one that brought a torrent of reader mail. A surprising amount was positive.

But it disturbed me that the negative mail came in the form of personal attacks suggesting I was too affluent, didn't care what happened to poor people, etc.

The negative mail also suggested we could easily pay for the prescription drug benefit by eliminating all the "waste, fraud and abuse" in government spending. We could, for instance, eliminate spending on medical care for illegal immigrants. Others wanted to do it by cutting defense spending. Still others thought eliminating subsidies to corporations could cover it.

Sadly, waste, fraud and abuse are what the government spends on others, never what the government spends on us. As large as waste, fraud and abuse may be, nothing comes close to what we spend on Social Security and Medicare.

As I pointed out earlier last year, a new measure of the size of the bill we are sending to our kids was cut from the president's budget for 2004 because the figures were considered too frightening.

The new generational accounting found that our government had promised far more in benefits than it would ever collect in taxes. Priced in today's dollars, the shortfall was $43.4 trillion in 2003 and will rise to $44.8 trillion this year.

That's more than our collective net worth, even if you include Bill Gates. In effect, the United States of America is already a bankrupt nation.

The only question is when our government will default on its promises — and how the hurt will be distributed. Virtually every dime of that shortfall is related to two programs: Social Security and Medicare.

That $43.4 trillion figure, by the way, was growing more than $1 trillion a year before passage of the Medicare prescription drug plan. Which raises a question: When will either political party get real about what we can and cannot afford?

If all this mystifies you, let me take you to the two root problems.

Biology: The shortfall isn't the result of an evil plot by tax-cutting Republicans or free-spending Democrats. It is the result of raw biology.

When Congress created Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1964, it created a seamless bond between our life expectancy and government spending. When life expectancy goes up, so does the cost of supporting the retired. Ditto their medical expenses, which are part of the cost of living. If the costs go up, taxes must rise proportionately.

In 1935, life expectancy at birth was under 60 years. A promise of lifetime income after age 65 wasn't a big deal.

Life expectancy at birth, however, has been advancing for more than a century.

As recently as 1950, male life expectancy at birth was 65.6 years, indicating an average "retirement" of about seven months.

By 2000, male life expectancy at birth was 79.5 years, indicating an average retirement, at age 65, of 14.5 years.

If the trend continues, as we all hope it will, life expectancy will grow about 2.5 years every decade.

Retirement is getting longer.

Are we saving more money to pay the expenses? No.

Instead, we lobby for more benefits from government. This means we want our government to take the money from someone else — those "waste, fraud and abuse" people or, more likely, from our children.

The second problem is political.

Politicians of both ilks continue to wallow in comfortable but useless Have vs. Have-Not arguments. A more important dimension is never mentioned, let alone discussed.

And what is that?

It is the enslavement of the Laters by the Nows. We are willing to impoverish our children by voting to spend their future income on ourselves, while cutting what we pay in taxes today.

This is an issue we need to discuss honestly and head-on. It will affect all our futures, rich and poor, young and old.

Our silence is deafening.

-- posted by lcha

Top 788. Jan 13, 2004 10:12 AM

» MarketVVizard - Drucker on China

Drucker Sees Problems in China's Growth Engine

Andy Mukherjee Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Management guru Peter Drucker thinks China, the crown prince of the world economy, might miss its coronation.

In a faxed response to questions put to him by Bloomberg News -- Drucker prefers to correspond by fax -- the father of modern management theory paints a rather bleak picture of the most-populous nation.

``The state-planned factories in China are a major social and economic threat,'' Drucker says. ``Many -- most? -- are in the wrong place turning out the wrong product and are greatly overstaffed. Maintaining them threatens bankruptcy; closing them threatens social revolution.''

Overall, ``the chances of very serious social unrest in China in the next 10 years are greater than 50 percent,'' Drucker sums up.

It's the 94-year-old Drucker's second alert on China in a month. That country, Drucker argued in a recent Fortune magazine interview, may not be able to absorb its vast army of rural poor into cities without social upheaval. At the same time, the country's existing base of educated professionals is too small, he said.

On both the counts, ``India's progress is far more impressive than China's,'' Drucker concluded.

Drucker's verdict on the hopeless situation of China's 300,000 state- owned companies, and their 75 million workers shouldn't be taken lightly at a time when it's becoming increasingly important to consider a global economic landscape, where, in Drucker's words, ``the dominance of the U.S. is already over.''

China or India?

China and India, with a third of the world's population between them, are both capable candidates to become the world's future engine of growth, especially as Japanese society, with all its advances in technology, is simply too old to fill the void.

Therefore, from automakers and cellular phone operators to consumer banks and credit card companies, it's crucial for businessmen to ask, ``Who's more likely to make it: China or India?''

To be sure, China's economic march since it started opening its economy in 1978 has been rapid. In comparison, India's progress in shedding the baggage of its socialist past has been tardy, and oftentimes marred by the hurdles put up by its democratic decision- making process. In 2002, China exported eight times as many goods as India and its gross domestic product grew twice as fast as India's 4.3 percent.

China also got 12 times more foreign investment than India.

Now, as Drucker told Fortune, India, with its numerous engineers and specialist doctors, ``is becoming a powerhouse very fast.'' Whereas, ``the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people.''

China's Catching Up

While the substance of Drucker's argument is valid -- India does indeed have a bigger talent pool -- China may not be quite the backwater of education that Drucker is making it out to be. For one, the actual number of Chinese college students, if official media reports are to be believed, is probably closer to 8 million (and not 1.5 million, as Drucker argues).

Also, just like India now has aspirations to become more China-like in its ``hard'' infrastructure -- roads, ports and telecommunications -- China too is emulating India and building a reservoir of ``soft'' skills.

In his comments to Bloomberg News, Drucker does concede the point that China is ``building its knowledge infrastructure very fast'' and he's ``impressed by the number and quality of executive management programs in China.''

That said, India does have a more enduring advantage that China can't match by simply scaling up college enrollments.

Unlike China, which has depended on foreign capital and technology to pave the road to progress, India has allowed far greater leeway to local entrepreneurs, such as N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys Technologies Ltd., the country's second-largest software services exporter, and K. Anji Reddy, chairman of Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd., the second-biggest drug maker.

Entrepreneurial Advantage

As a result, India now has a number of indigenous companies that rank among the world's best, whereas in China, ``you would be hard- pressed to find a single homegrown Chinese firm that operates on a global scale and markets its own products abroad,'' Yasheng Huang, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tarun Khanna, a professor at Harvard Business School, wrote in an August article in Foreign Policy magazine.

The future may still go either way. Although, for India a vote from Drucker will prove to be a strong selling point.
[VViz: Or the fututre may go NEITHER way]
``Drucker's name will surely help sell the India story,'' said Adrian Lim, who manages holdings in Indian computer software companies at Aberdeen Asset Management Asia in Singapore. ``Especially to remote investors, who aren't able to see the growth dynamic for themselves.''

-- posted by MarketVVizard