Where’s the economy going?

The recent stock market jitters have arrived at a momentous confluence between the end of Bush presidential term, record high commodity prices, a financial crisis spreading into the entire world and the coming of age of the “BRIC” nations (Brasil, Russia, India and China.) So what’s an investor to think and what seems to be the best strategy? While it’s quite difficult to peer into the future and plan a well defined pathway, it seems to me that human ingenuity will, once more, come to the rescue and get us out of that “pickle.” Let’s start with America. If, as I hope, Obama becomes our next president, he will be able to inspire and mobilize the entire nation and get things rolling in areas like new energy policy, health care reform and pragmatic fiscal responsibility (not quite the Wall Street Journal’s kind, but never mind!) There maybe a tough couple of years ahead for all of us, but it will be, at the end, worth it. The financial crisis will bring real estate values substantially down, especially in hard-hit areas that were dominated by speculators, where from “constipated” as it stands now, selling and buying will resume, albeit at drastically reduced and much more realistic prices. Finally, the BRIC nations are here to stay and will continue to flourish, even though they may never enjoy the excessive standard of living we’ve seen for decades; they’ll probably meet us “halfway” however, and that may be the point that’s going to hurt us, the so-called “developed nations.” We’ll finally have to accept to go down quite substantially in order to survive a bit longer…