Salient to Investors:
Fareed Zakaria said:
- Obama’s Syria policy is destined for failure and almost certain to produce chaos and unintended consequences.
- Joshua Landis at Syria Comment estimates that non-jihadi groups collectively control only about 5% of Syria.
- The underlying reason for the violence in Iraq and Syria is a Sunni revolt against Baghdad and Damascus.
- The only strategy against ISIS that has any chance of working is containment.
Dr. Peter Piot said:
- This is the first Ebola epidemic where entire nations are involved, where big cities are affected, while the response to the epidemic is running behind the virus. The virus is still running much faster.
- The 3 countries affected are being totally destabilized and their economies have come to a standstill.
- Nigeria’s and Senegal’s success at containment shows that this was an avoidable catastrophe.
- As long as there is a major epidemic in West Africa, the rest of the world is at risk.
Citigroup predicts that the US could export as many as 1 million barrels of oil per day by 2015.
Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia would accept oil prices below $90 for a year or two to discourage the search for shale, natural gas, and other oil alternatives.
Ruchir Sharma at Morgan Stanley said:
- Over the last decade Chinese oil demand had been increasing on average by 7% a year but is now down to 0%.
- Saudi Arabia just has to charge $88 per barrel to balance its books.
- Libya needs oil at $180 to break even.
- Iran needs oil at $143 to break even.
- Russia needs oil at $110 to break even.
Martin Wolf at The Financial Times said:
- Markets often overreact and predict ten of the next four recessions.
- Much of the correction is the market realizing that US monetary policy is changing.
- Europe looks very bad.
- Germany is a symptom, not a cause, a caboose, not a locomotive, because it depends on other countries’ demand. Germany still expects the rest of the world to generate demand for them but it is not going to happen because there is not anyone to do the buying except the US. The Germans cannot start consuming for cultural and political reasons.
- The US has no intelligent alternative to generating another private sector credit boom which could result in the US in 4-6 years in an even worse mess than before, so it won’t do it.
- The financial sector is still too highly leveraged and we might have a worse crisis.
Rana Foroohar at Time said:
- Slowing Chinese growth, Europe slowing and perhaps tipping into recession, structural imbalances that still exist 5 years after the end of the crisis, do not paint a nice picture.
- The US growth of 3% is insufficient to drag the rest of the world along.
Daniel Dresna said the IMF, G-20 and WTO all performed brilliantly during the global financial crisis and have rescued the world from a total economic collapse.
Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript
at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1410/19/fzgps.01.html