Once More ... With Passion

Hi folks, I'm currently in the south island of New Zealand (nu zulund) to the locals :-)

Mainly walking up hills and getting some sailing in.

Now usually in my working life I'm time poor and information rich.
Plugged into the ephemeral information highway provided by radio, tv t'interweb, txt msg, rss feeds, however accurate or apocryphal !

However Since Ive been traveling around New Zealand. Ive been going weeks without seeing an idiot lantern, days without seeing a newspaper or computer with a decent connection, and even if I'm somewhere that actually gets a reasonable radio reception (rare) It tends to be limited to local news.

So here @ the ends of the earth I find myself 'Time Rich but Information Poor'.

So after Ive hauled my sorry arse up yet another mountain to experience a(nother) truly amazing view, Ive got to face the long plod down hill again, or across to the next saddle (usually far more scary than the climb up).

So, Ive started using this time to analyse what information I'm actually hearing about the global market (hold on, stay with me folks, the reasons will become clear in a bit), and to stop me concentration to hard on my next step - as this usually leads to error, and error will lead in the main to 'accident', accident out here in the boonies is usually defined in levels of terminal philosophy :-)

So what do I know about the world from the data gathered

Well we seem to be heading into a first world economic slow down.

Breaking the first world economies (to which I have ready access to info), US, Europe, Australasia

The US, incumbent US treasurer is forecasting a general slow down of growth estimating this to be no greater that 2% (with a margin of error of 2.5%).
However Alan Greenspan the former head of the US treasury is forecasting a soft landing of -2% growth in real terms in the next year to 18 months .
Since in the past uncle Alan's predictions have been generally on the money, maybe we should pay then some attention.

In Europe,the housing market in the UK is still over inflated (estimates place this in the region of pby upwards of 200+ %) and in real terms it is the (false) driving force sustaining the economy's ongoing growth cycles.

Most of Europe is experiencing sluggish (or no growth) and struggling with balance of payments outside its euro 'partners' - wooden euro rich, cash poor, is the mantra.

Oz, has a series of serious environmental problems of its own (that it seems incapable of solving due to political meddling), and is detracting from its potential as a tiger economy. This is making new investors unsure of committing to the country or its markets.

Now why have I embarked on this train of thought ?
Well basically, I work in that fickle of all niches, the software industry and on top of that I work in one of the most niche of all niche software markets.

So what next?

Well tomorrow I'm going to do a day climb on of the large lumps of rock in the mount cook range - so I'll pby think more then (in between swearing lots)

The natural extrapolation of this hypothetical scenario is pby to perform a 'simplified' strategic analysis of the organisation for whom I work and produce a series of hypothetical scenario choices to react to the information highlighted above.
More as I think of it.

j