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Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

Thought Leaders of the Islamic Crescent

by Douglas Clark Johnson

21 January 2011

Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” includes eleven luminaries from the Islamic Crescent. We take a closer look at their causes, goals, and accomplishments.

Friends call me a magazine junkie. I once arrived at my airplane seat and dropped a stack of magazines on the armrest. The man next to me said, “Are you a speed reader? It’s only a 50-minute flight.”

My stack often includes Foreign Policy, a Washington-based publication serving the international affairs community. The December issue was devoted to the “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” (See www.foreignpolicy.com/2010globalthinkers.)

The list starts with the names you’d expect in a US-published magazine: Gates and Buffet paired as the most influential. President Obama is in the top tier; so is Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, as we wrestle with the aftermath of what could have been a financial apocalypse. Then, after the usual suspects, the list gets interesting.

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Urbanization, Past and Present

by Douglas Clark Johnson

15 August 2010

The discovery of an 18th century ship reminds us that the United States was once an emerging market. This suggests cues for today’s investors as the world’s population fills more and more megacities.

Ordinarily I avoid the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan; the memories still smolder. But I traveled eagerly to West and Liberty Streets to view the “mystery ship”—or what was left of it.
In mid-July, the partial frame of an 18th century vessel was uncovered during construction activity near Ground Zero. It lay in a section of the site that was never excavated for the original World Trade Center project.

Backhoe operators unearthed what looked like a sodden woodpile, eventually identified as the 10-meter-long front section, ribs decomposing, of a brigantine. This two-masted workhorse of coastal transport may have carried lumber from New England or sugar from Barbados, traded for agricultural commodities grown on outlying farms. Once the ship’s transport life ended, its remains apparently served as landfill for the growing city.

Trade and maritime themes offer classic metaphors for the investment business. There may be lessons for global investors in this cargo ship, built for efficiency and re-purposed pragmatically, once it was derelict.

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Tartar Cameleer: Georgia as an East-West Trade Bridge

by Douglas Clark Johnson

25 January 2010

The visitor to the nation of Georgia continually encounters images by Niko Pirosmanashvili (1862-1918), known as Pirosmani and considered a master of naïve painting. His portraits of Georgians enjoying daily life a century ago—peasants, fishermen, musicians, even millionaires—pop up everywhere as restaurant murals and tourist mementos. And even occasionally as the original artwork.

Niko Pirosmanashvilli's painting The Cameleer

It is noteworthy, then, that Pirsomani’s sense of the ordinary extended to a man in oriental costume holding the tether of a Bactrian camel. Tartar Cameleer evokes the Silk Road, suggesting that the commonplace extended to caravans passing through Tiflis (now Tbilisi). In view of the painting’s 1914 date, the cameleer image may have been nostalgic, but it is a vivid, if rustic, indication of Georgia’s longstanding role as trade junction between Central Asia and Europe.

From the perspective of global investment strategy, Pirosmani’s portrait of the camel driver conveys the cosmopolitan nature of the Georgian economy. His worldview prevails into the present day as Georgia looks both East and West to affirm its progressive identity.
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United States: The Demerol Economy

by Douglas Clark Johnson

08 September 2009

If the United States economy were a hospital, its patients would run the risk of addiction to the fiscal equivalent of Demerol, the high-powered painkiller. Whether the nation can maintain the current course of treatment without severe side effects, let alone withdrawal symptoms, is a quandary facing investors who are presented with a mixed set of economic and market symptoms.

Over the past year, the government has served as white knight to the auto industry, tried to stimulate the housing industry with tax credits, and pumped untold additional billions into the financial system. Congressional legislation meanwhile has been chock-full of spending programs in an attempt to amplify the wave of hand-outs. When combined with the Federal Reserve’s asset-purchase program, the total stimulus package has amounted to almost 20% of GDP. The figure is staggering by developed-world standards. …continue reading

China: Alone in Its Confidence

by Douglas Clark Johnson

05 February 2009

In an inaugural week, you would expect the international news weeklies to carry a cover story on the incoming US president. Time ran a feature on President Obama entitled, “Great Expectations.” The Economist did the same, but called it, “Renewing America.” Newsweek? Well, their editorial board decided to publish a special issue, labeled “Why China Works.”

Maybe that says two things: that the world does not revolve around Washington and that the global economy may be a bigger issue than who is in the White House. The subhead to the Newsweek cover story certainly had a sobering message for many US-focused economists: “Inside the command-capitalism model that will outrun all rivals.”

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Islamic Banks: Front and Center

by Douglas Clark Johnson

19 January 2009

As a newly declared finance major in college, I recall my Money & Banking professor proclaiming on the first day of class, “Don’t ever forget that our banking system is most fundamentally based on confidence.”

It struck me as an odd statement at the time. Given decades of institution-building and multiple regulatory overlays in the United States, her notion seemed almost antique. Or was it?

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