Institutional Investor (June issue)
“Optimism is beginning to infect Japan’s corporate leaders–a crucial factor considering that the new policies must spur corporate investment and expansion if they are to succeed in fostering a sustainable economic turnaround.” Corporate leaders have welcomed Abenomics, but the jury is still out. “Corporate Japan will consider the new government successful if it can end the psychology of deflation and stagnation and offer the prospect of renewed growth. So far, business leaders are fairly optimistic.”
Tags: Corporate leaders, Deflation, Expansion, Government, Investment, Japan, Optimism, Psychology, Stagnation
Financial Times (February 1)
“Europe enjoyed the first month of 2013 in a mood of relative optimism – a relief after years where one financial near-death experience followed the other. The fissile market pressures on the eurozone are slowly going into reverse, with private money leaving havens and returning to the periphery. Yet clouds continue to clump over the region’s banks. Even if the debt crisis gradually abates, Europe is far from done with cleaning up its banking system.”
Tags: Banks, Debt crisis, Europe, eurozone, Optimism
Barron’s (November 5)
“It has been an eventful year in Brazil, though perhaps not in the way investors would have liked. The country’s growth has stalled to an expected 1.5% this year—a figure not exactly befitting an emerging market, especially one that not so long ago had been growing at four times that rate.” Despite the bad economic news, however, four experts assembled at a Barron’s roundtable believe Brazil investors have “reason for optimism.”
Tags: Brazil, Emerging market, Growth, Investors, Optimism
Time (May 26)
Most of us are irrationally optimistic. “Neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic,” which is both good and bad. “Overly positive assumptions can lead to disastrous miscalculations….But the bias also protects and inspires us: it keeps us moving forward…. Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat.”
Tags: Assumptions, Bias, Miscalculations, Neuroscience, Optimism
Time (November 1)
Fareed Zakaria, Time’s Editor-at-Large, notes that when he leaves the U.S. to visit India, it appears “the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future.” In contrast, the mood in the U.S. is “sour. Americans are glum, dispirited and angry…. The can-do country is convinced that it can’t.”
