Salient to Investors:
Paul Farrell writes:
The fashion industry is betting megabucks on the future of America’s economy and stock market. At the peak of the 1990s mania tech magazines were also bloated with hundreds of pages of ads. Ad pages signal economic health.
Barnes & Noble’s racks are filled with women’s fashion magazines, all bloated with holiday shopping ads just like the 1999 tech magazines at the peak of the dot-com mania.
Behavioral economic research confirm that women see the world differently, in their investment strategies, in what they value most in the economy, and think longer term.
The single biggest emerging global trend is women leading America and the world.
New Economy job skills empower women, level the playing field.
50% more women get college degrees and are beginning to dominate professions like accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, forensic pathology and veterinary practices.
In 1998 there were only two women CEOs in the Fortune 500 companies, now there are 19 – at IBM, Pepsico, Xerox, Kraft and DuPont.
Women lead the IMF, Germany and Brazil. Women held 10% of all state legislative seats in the early 1980s, now they hold 24%. There are 17 women US Senators, 73 women representatives, 6 state governors. Worldwide, women make up 20% of elected legislators, almost double 15 years ago. Women reinvest economic gains back into their families and communities more than men do.
Jeremy Grantham says our male-dominated patriarchal culture has created an army of left-brained immediate doers – Wall Street and Corporate America focus on millisecond trades, daily quotes, quarterly earnings and annual bonuses, discounting to zero the longer-term social costs. Grantham says the planet cannot feed the 10 billion global population predicted by the United Nations by 2050, and male-dominated capitalism is absolutely unable to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output.
Jennifer Homans at the New York Times says patriarchy is crumbling and we are at the beginning of a new era in which women, and womanly skills and traits, are on the rise.
Read the full article at http://www.marketwatch.com/story/womens-fashion-ad-indicator-new-bull-2013-2012-10-09