In the opening statement of this website, a short description of the reason of starting this website is given. However, at this juncture, a more detailed description of the aim and the methodology of this website will benefit readers more in assessing the results of our research.
The aim of this website is to assess the current condition of the global economy and to project its future course. The most basic ingredient of our research is the reliable economic data. However, economic data have gaps and often the true status is hidden beneath the superficial look of the data. That is when logic and careful considerations of the status of societies involved must come into play. In this kind of approach absolute objectivity is essential. That is why this website does not adhere to any economic or political agenda. That is also why this website does not offer any advice about economic or political policies since once such advices are given the upholding to the advised policies will naturally become the agenda itself. This, of course, does not mean that we will not discuss policies. The past and the current economic conditions are apparently the result of the past and the current policies. The future economic conditions will be shaped by the current and future policies. Thus we have been and will devote a lot of spaces into the discussions and the analyses of past, present and future courses of policies.
The statement that this website does not have any political agenda does not mean that we are going to ignore political policies and events. Again on the contrary economic conditions and political policies and trends are entangled and cannot be separated. This website discusses and analyzes the past, the present and the future directions of political trends and events if we believe that those trends and events have significant influences on economic conditions. The lack of political agenda means that through the discussions and analyses we are not endorsing nor opposing any specific political policy or event, but we are not holding back from our observations that certain political policies and events have caused or may cause favorable or unfavorable economic conditions. A good example is Article 6 that discusses geopolitical conflicts in Asian-Pacific region. After reading the section about Japan, probably both the leftwing and the rightwing of Japan are unhappy because both of them are not portrayed in the fashion as they themselves wanted to be viewed. The section about China probably has drawn the displeasure of the royalists of Chinese communist regime. The same can be said about Taiwan and US China policy; the discussion there must be unpleasant to various factions with specific political agendas. We are not deliberately antagonizing various groups with specific political or economic agendas. We deem that an objective and honest assessment of the past political and economic conditions of the region is necessary to lead to a profound understanding of the current geopolitical conflict of the region, and in turn the major geopolitical conflict of the region, that is, the rise of China, is influencing and will increasingly shape the outcome of the globalization scheme.
With given economic data, sound logic, and good understanding about the societies involved, and with all the good intentions, different observers will often reach quite different conclusions. We do not claim that our conclusions and observations are absolute. That is why when we present our conclusions and observations, lengthy chains of logic behind the thinking processes are presented so that readers can judge the soundness of the derivations and conclusions by themselves. However, this also implies that at each article, comment, or projection the similar basic themes from that the logical derivation starts need to be repeated over and over again. This may create an impression of tediousness and awkwardness in the minds of frequent readers, but we do not see any good measure to avoid such repetition whereas preserving the logical consistence of the arguments.
Many readers of this website are probably also stock market investors. Those readers naturally are concerned about the movement in stock markets. The attitude of this website toward stock markets is summarized in Comments 1 and 2. However, there are stock market debacles resulting from shifting conditions in the globalization scheme, and those stock market events are within the scope of the analyses of this website. Let us quote some sentences from Article 1, of December 1998, to illustrate such concerns. For example, in the last paragraph of Section 6 of Article 1, it stated, "....., or the crises renews in Latin America to prompt the Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rate aggressively to prevent a credit crunch, the interest rate gap between the dollar and the yen will diminish and the dollar will fall precipitously. At that occasion the Japanese money will leave and the American bubble will burst in the year of 2000." To be honest we must point out that at the time of Article 1, we have not established the time delay factor from the major currency exchange rate movement to major change of trend in trade imbalance as 2 years; that 2-year delay factor was established only in Article 2 of August 2003. At the time of writing of Article 1, the delay factor was assumed to be around 1 year, and the projection of the US stock market debacle in year 2000 was derived with some fudge factors. Looking back from our current understanding about the 2-year delay factor, we should have projected the start of US stock market debacle at the middle of 2000, 2 years after the first sharp drop of Dollar vs. Yen in the middle of 1988. Since the projection of Article 1, no notice of a pending US stock market debacle due to the changing conditions of the globalization has been issued. This does not mean that we are forgetting about this issue, but is simply due to the lack of indication from our analyses about such a pending stock market debacle directly related to the economic fundamentals of the globalization scheme. However, we must warn that stock market debacles can result outside of the changing economic conditions of the globalization scheme. Those extra factors include natural and manmade disasters, wars, political events like protectionism and other unforeseen events. This kind of events will be discussed in this website, but the timings of the occurrence of those events are difficult to anticipate. It should also be noted that the stock market debacle, that was induced by the changing conditions of the globalization scheme, preceding the recent one at 2000-2001 occurred in 1987, with a 13 year interval.
This website assigns an outsized importance to the currency exchange rates in moving the trade balances and thus shaping the globalization scheme itself. Unlike the case of stock markets, we do monitor closely and project the movements of currencies and the price of the monetary metal, gold, in the section of Currency and Gold, as well as through comments and within some articles.
This website does not have the feature of an interactive discussion panel. If a reader wants to communicate with the editor, he/she may use the e-mail address c.k.chen@att.net. However, it should be forewarned that we will not respond to any questions about investment decisions or strategies, nor market timing inquiries except whatever is presented in the contents of this website. We also appreciate very much that the content of e-mails be restricted to the discussions about the contents published on this website or related topics, or technical factors about this website. Also we would like to apologize beforehand that if the number of e-mails exceeds our available resource, we may not be able to reply to every e-mail. If any interactive blog wants to invite us to join their discussion for a short while, we will try our best, within our available resorces, to comply with the request.
It should also be pointed out that every projection of future events or trends in whatever area is nothing but an intelligent guess. The accuracies of such projections are determined by the data used, the soundness of the logic behind, and other personal factors of the observer. If anyone wants to use such projections presented in this website to facilliate his/her action in whatever way, he/she should keep in mind that a projection is a way to tell the fortune of future and always has a certain chance to be incorrect.