What a difference a few months can make

At the Senate Conference held in Monaco in July, Jason Pidcock shared his thoughts on what he saw as potential risks for Asian equity markets. A few months on, Pidcock reviews whether his analysis still holds true today, given the recent turbulence in the US sub-prime mortgage market

At the time of the conference in June, the world's financial markets were awash with liquidity and an impending credit squeeze as a distant possibility. Most Asian stock markets were at record high levels, despite renewed concerns over the US sub-prime credit market. At the conference, we had expressed our concerns as to the overly leveraged financial market and saw this as a risk to global stock markets, including Asia. However, given the long-term strength in the fundamentals of the region's economies and markets (for example, most Asian economies are running current account surpluses a...