Columnists

People appear hungry for good news about the economy and investment markets. While there are some positive signs, I believe it is too soon to be breaking out the party hats.

A few months before his death, US investment guru Peter Bernstein, into his 90th year and still sharp as a tack, wrote an article recalling 1958 when, for the first time in living memory, the average yield from shares at 3.3 percent fell below the government stock rate of 3.8 percent.

A colleague of mine went to Zimbabwe last year and he showed me a bank note with a face value of Z$50 billion (that's Z$50,000,000,000!). Even more unusual was that the note carried an expiry date of December 2008. Thanks to runaway inflation of millions of per cent a year, that bank note would not even buy a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe.

I have always been fascinated by the fragility - yet resilience - of humankind in the face of immensely powerful forces such as the weather, nature and, well, the universe in general.