I take a positive approach about the future. Perhaps I am genetically hard-wired that way. Maybe it is from my life experiences.
When I was a child, medical treatment consisted of sulfa drugs, penicillin, aspirin, and iodine. Many parents back then—including my own—were told, “If he makes to morning, he will be fine.”
Today, millennials are worried about hearing the wrong pronoun. Sixty-years ago in a speech to the UN, Lorenzo Sumulong, head of the Philippine delegation, said “the peoples of Eastern Europe have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up by the Soviet Union.”
Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, denounced Sumulong as “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey,” a “toady of American imperialism”, at one point picking up his shoe and banging the desk with it. Soviet military thinkers believed that they could achieve a decisive victory by preemptive nuclear strikes.
Today students require universities build rooms designated as “Safe Spaces.” In 1963 St. Olaf College, founded in 1874, built 16 fully stocked bomb shelters to house its 2,000 students to survive radioactive fallout after a nuclear blast.
Tell me more about how you were traumatized by online classes during the pandemic.
My first job at 16 was in a store owned by a Holocaust survivor who carried an Auschwitz concentration camp forearm tattoo. Tell me more of the oppression and abuse you suffer being forced to use Twitter and Facebook.
I am a firm believer in that motivational cliché for recovering alcoholics. “Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change…etc.” The “Serenity” part is the only thing that matters. I keep the list of things that I worry about to a bare minimum.
But even with a positive attitude and understanding of cycles, I am concerned about the future. We have a firestorm of cycles converging—disease, war, and economic chaos. It is a great time to be alive if you do not like being bored.
Last week India announced it would ban exports of wheat. Sara Menker, food insecurity analyst and CEO of Gro Intelligence, told the UN Security Council last week that the world has about 10 weeks of stored wheat supplies.
“We are in a crisis right now as far as the food chain goes,” said the president of one US Farmers Association. “I never imagined paying $5.63 for a gallon of diesel, $900 a ton for fertilizer, and all-time high prices for soybean seeds.”
US Department of Agriculture: “Global corn and global wheat production is forecast down with lower crops in the US, Europe, China, Argentina, and Brazil. Global rice production is forecast at a record with larger crops in South and Southeast Asia.”
The good news. Philippine volume of rice and corn production is up 6.6 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively, from Q1 2020 and Q1 2022. The bad news is that all volumes of livestock, poultry and fishery production are down. But from 2021, hopefully the worst is behind us with poultry/pork up but with fish still dropping.
The global food price/supply problem is one of several potential failures. Most seem insignificant like the “German beer-bottle shortage.” German Brewers’ Federation: “If you don’t have long-term contracts, you currently have to pay 80 percent more for new glass bottles than you did a year ago.” That is a tip of the iceberg.
If the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, it will kill the US housing market. An appreciating US dollar will cause sovereign defaults in “poor” countries and for “poor” households in “rich” countries.
Now the T.G.Y. Filipino.
The government’s fiscal condition is good despite all the political propaganda. There is considerable wiggle room with both monetary and fiscal policy, and it is unlikely that the Marcos administration will steer any other course.
Let me introduce T.G.Y. Asean. Divide the world into one billion population areas and Asean comes out on top for economic growth, manageable inflation and debt, domestic and foreign investment, capital formation, and peace.
The next 12 months, even with the ogres China and US lurking in the shadows, should see a closer unity among Asean nations. All the political and economic garbage from the West may be a blessing in disguise for the Philippines and our regional neighbors.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.