[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #34

If you asked the same questions to people in Thailand and Malaysia around 1994 and 1995, they would have answered the same way. More vibrant than ever. No sign of any danger in horizon. I have no doubt that things look the way you described in the streets of Shanhai. That was the way it looked in Seoul in 1996 and in NYC in 1999. All the troubles were behind. Only the bright future. But I knew that Korea was having some problems starting 1994. It was the matter of time. It hit eventually, in the way worse than I expected. I thought that America will be in trouble after 1996's Greenspan's "Irrational Exhuberance speech. Looks can be deceiving. It does not take a financial genius to figure it out as long as one is not blinded by hypes.

[AIG]

Having a financial crisis here and there doesn't mean the country as a whole is going to be down forever. Since the bottom of the Great Depression, US GDP has risen almost 200-fold and the Dow has also risen by about 200-fold. Instead of paying attention to financial crises here and there which are inevitable but not fatal, you have to look at the long-term trends given the resources a country has.

[AIG]

Probably, 20-30 years ago, Korea's per-capita GDP was the same as China's today. But in 2-3 decades, look at how far Korea has come. If anything, China's got everything Korea has in terms of exporting capability but also a much larger domestic market. Politically, most E. Asian "tigers" followed a one-party, authoritarian path of economic development as well. Given a choice between democratic Russia and India and authoritarian E. Asia, it's obvious which path China prefers.