Goldman blogs at the Asia Times, this post was brief:
Putting my money where my mouth is.
Earlier today he said:Japan fears are overdone
I don’t have any more information about Japan’s nuclear reactor risks than any other casual follower of news reports, but I have to think the market’s reaction to Japan is exaggerated. In the long run we are all dead, and Japan in particular is dead, with its shrinking workforce and rapidly aging population and 233% debt to GDP ratio. Moody’s suggestion yesterday that Japan’s natural disaster will accelerate the reckoning with its debt problems appears to have some traction, and the free-fall in Japanese (and sharp fall in other) markets is a panic response. The best Asian analyst I know is Cantor Fitzgerald’s Uwe Parpart, who thinks there are bargains out there:
At the moment, of course for a short period of time as the Japanese market drops, people will tend to stay away from it. But if you look at just today and yesterday, we have nearly a 10% drop in the Nikkei combined. Under those circumstances, there will be a lot of stocks that will look cheap and that will look attractive to investors. Once the initial emotional reaction is over, we will see that the flows into Japan, which were continuous since last fall, will resume and will resume at some significant level.We simply do not have an instance in modern history in which an economy was ruined by a natural disaster....MORE
