Economist on emerging markets investing: “A more promising approach is to think of countries in terms of their growth models instead. This framework would apply to the familiar big emerging economies, as well as to the edgier, “frontier” markets. Investors who want more exposure to export-oriented powerhouses could turn not just to China, South Korea and Taiwan, but also to later adopters of the model, such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. These are still minnows compared with the incumbents’ market capitalisation of about $16trn. But adding them makes sense, since they are already beneficiaries of rising Chinese wages, and could expand into technologically advanced manufacturing. A second category could include countries that rely instead on services-led growth, with all the promise of healthy middle-class consumption. Here, India and Indonesia are possible candidates; Kenya might be a frontier market worth investigating. And a third group could include commodity exporters, such as Brazil, Russia and South Africa.”
Liu Cixin of “The Three-Body Problem” fame: “In the past, we used to have an assumption: that if humanity was faced with a collective threat, people would throw away their differences, unite, join forces and overcome the crisis together. Now I realize that might have been too perfect of a wish. Looking back at the past two years, the pandemic has pushed nations toward more divisions. The events of the past few years have made me feel the uncertainty of the future, and made me realize that we cannot use straight-line thinking to predict what is to come. Sudden twists and turns that we haven’t anticipated could happen at any time. So if the aliens really come to Earth, I see two possibilities: One is that we all pull together to face their arrival. The other: They will come to Earth and we will become more and more fractured. It’s hard not to admit that the second possibility is probably more plausible. It’s the most likely conclusion that can be reached from what we’ve seen over the past two years.”
Jim Collins: “What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
