This is a good question and there are currently many pieces of data that make me think that we may be coming to the end of the recession.
In the last week we have seen Germany, France and Japan actually post GDP growth between April and June 2009. This has brought an end to the year-long recession for these nations.
I strongly suspect more countries will follow in the coming months. (more…)
You will have probably heard that in recent months, many of the major economies have resorted to printing money to try and tackle the global financial problems we have been having.
This undoubtedly presents a potential inflation risk. Some of the best ways to hedge against inflation include:
The main reason is the lack of value for money. It is not uncommon for them to charge many many more times more than what a discount stock broker would charge.
The main reasons I feel they don’t offer value are:
As I am sure you know you know crude oil prices have been all over the place recently. We had a high of $147 in July 2008 and a low of $33 in February 2009. At the time of writing this post the spot oil price is hovering around the $70 area.
My thinking is that NOW may be a great time to invest in the stock market. There is no doubt there has been an enormous amount of doom and gloom in the financial markets. We have had major high street banks needing to be bailed out by governments, we’ve had a dramatic cut in lending to businesses and individuals and we are currently in the biggest recession since the 1930s.
