As one saying goes "bears sound smart, bulls make money".
While I'm very bearish (ie, smart !) on the current state of the US stock market, I wouldn't recommend shorting to anyone - it's just too risky and frustrating.
The next decades will be very interesting though - there are very significant changes in demographics dynamics. I'm wondering how much of past stock performance is due to simply populations of Western countries growing and markets expanding ? What happens when that stops ?
If real estate in small villages of Japan / Italy is an indicator, there is a decent chance that future profit growth won't look anything like the past one.
Real estate in China is probably even more interesting - Chineese economy was fuelled for a long time by a real estate boom. As of today, they have build so many homes / appartments, that they can home 2-3 billion people according to estimates. But... as everybody knows, Chinas population is set to shrink from 1.4B to less than 1B by 2100, and given the size of the country relative to world's population, they can't simply 'import immigrants' like smaller nations could.
So what happens next ? I don't think the world has ever faced such a crazy situation.
What happens next is Japan, in different shades per each culture and nation. I understand this prediction is bold, and fraught with peril considering the time horizon (difficulty of prediction success increases as time horizon does), but the evidence and data so far is compelling imho.
The slow deflationary burn is over the crest of the hill we’re approaching. A very interesting time to be alive for sure.
With such a big over-supply of housing, I'm expecting China's real estate to perform much worse than Japan's did. But, it seems pretty crazy - the most populous country on earth, won't need to build a single home, for the forseable future.
> the most populous country on earth, won't need to build a single home, for the forseable future.
This is probably not the case.
There are whole cities in the middle of no where with no prospects or jobs that are stuffed with tons of housing. There is also a small problem with the quality of some of these buildings (tofu dregs).
Im not sure how much of it is going to be there in 10 years...
While I'm very bearish (ie, smart !) on the current state of the US stock market, I wouldn't recommend shorting to anyone - it's just too risky and frustrating.
The next decades will be very interesting though - there are very significant changes in demographics dynamics. I'm wondering how much of past stock performance is due to simply populations of Western countries growing and markets expanding ? What happens when that stops ?
If real estate in small villages of Japan / Italy is an indicator, there is a decent chance that future profit growth won't look anything like the past one.
Real estate in China is probably even more interesting - Chineese economy was fuelled for a long time by a real estate boom. As of today, they have build so many homes / appartments, that they can home 2-3 billion people according to estimates. But... as everybody knows, Chinas population is set to shrink from 1.4B to less than 1B by 2100, and given the size of the country relative to world's population, they can't simply 'import immigrants' like smaller nations could.
So what happens next ? I don't think the world has ever faced such a crazy situation.