Exploding Personal Wealth in the Asian Tropics taken from our ‘On Target Newsletter’ issue no 265
Southeast Asia’s largest economy, Indonesia, is expected to see 67 per cent growth of its people becoming ultra-high-net-worth over the next five years, according to British property consultancy Knight Frank. That’s those with personal wealth, including the value of primary residence, of more than $30 million.
It’s not just the super-wealthy who are doing well. According to the World Bank Indonesia’s middle-class consumption has grown at an average annual rate of 12 per cent since 2002 and now accounts for almost half all household consumption.
The richer Indonesians get, the more they spend on cars, health, education and other services.
Asia is the region where personal wealth is growing fastest and is already home to more billionaires than any other – 36 per cent of the world’s.
OT 265 27 March 2021
The US government is pumping money and credit into the economy on a mindblowing scale equated with a war-time splurge. The excuse is that it needs to counter the damage done by the pandemic, but the Biden administration views it as an opportunity to pour money into its favoured interests – voters, welfare, public services.
Commodity prices are surging and there’s the prospect of demand for some natural resources exceeding supplies for years to come. Some leading investment advisers now say that we’re in the early stages of another “super-cycle.”
There are four reasons why international fund managers’ pessimism about Europe could be wrong, argues JP Morgan’s chief market strategist for the region, Karen Ward:
The Pentagon has awarded $30 million to Australia’s Lynas – the world’s leading specialist outside China in mining rare earths – to develop a processing facility in Texas.
Prices of commodities are surging despite the fact that economies, many of them still in the grip of lockdowns, are still far from full recovery from the pandemic.
War risk is “consistently underestimated by money people” says FT commentator John Dizard following the escalation of tensions between China and Taiwan. The latter runs itself as a highly successful independent nation, but China insists it is a breakaway province that it is determined to recover.
