You Should Have Been There for the Perfect Storm – DealMakers Breakfast featuring Stuart Schweitzer
by “Should Have Been There” guest blogger, Larry Blumsack, President, Zoka Institute
Put on all the foul weather gear you can muster in order to keep your powder dry was the overall ominous message at last Thursday’s Dealmakers Breakfast. Speaker Stuart Schweitzer, Managing Director and Global Markets Strategist for JPMorgan Private Bank and JPMorgan Asset Management, pulled no punches about the economic and financial muddy, bumpy road the world economy will continue to face for numerous months or possibly a few years. Schweitzer eloquently and simply laid out a perfect storm scenario of what led up to our current financial debacle and recession. He wryly noted that government and financial markets were late, very late, in recognizing the recessionary factors that have brought us to where we now are.
The perfect storm started with the unprecedented over leveraging of the financial markets which lead to risk taking at levels that were unsustainable. Schweitzer forecasts the current recession we are in to be much worse than the last two post-war recessions. He suggests that there may be a protracted and bumpy bottom rather than the “V” shaped bottom typical of many of the past recessions.
Schweitzer applauds the government action and suggests that inflation is not a current concern in the face of such tight liquidity that is curbing demand. He continues to call for a coordinated effort by world governments to unfreeze the credit markets. That mantra and their success he offered as his ray of hope.
