-- Posted Friday, 29 July 2011 | | Disqus

For the past three years ArabianMoney has made the long trek from Dubai to Vancouver each July and found it rewarding both in terms of investment insights and meeting many North American investors. It is also a great way to gauge investment sentiment among a very influential group.

This year the mood is very pessimistic. John Mauldin, the brash Texan whose one million financial newsletter readers makes him the king of this business says ‘just stay away from equities’ although at the same time he is buying bio-tech stocks as ‘the next bubble and it pays to buy early’.

Euro zone crisis

Mauldin is deeply pessimistic about the eurozone debt crisis, ‘Lehman on steriods’, and forecasts that unless Germany decides to bail-out Europe at enormous cost then 80 per cent of European banks will be insolvent within two years.

When you see his presentation and read his new book it does all have the same horrible sense of inevitability that came before the US subprime crisis, and it was only the fringe newsletter writers who got that right, not the mainstream press commentators.

However, the consensus in the conference is also for an inevitable inflation and devaluation of the US dollar against every currency except the euro and the pound sterling. That just adds to the case for buying gold and silver which is universally accepted.

Sprott Resources, a Toronto hedge fund group now joined by Agora’s favorite stock broker and conference star Rick Rule, is heavily tipping silver for higher growth in price than gold due mainly to its scarcity and price suppression.

Inflation is also good news for oil prices, and ArabianMoney editor and publisher Peter Cooper explained to the conference how higher oil prices and political stability are benefiting the UAE as the Switzerland of the Middle East with even the Arab Uprisings of this year a positive factor.

He pointed to local UAE stock markets as a classic contrarian play with a clear economic recovery locally and absolutely no sign of it in share prices.

Global crisis

Of course a major crash in global financial markets would also impact on the UAE bourses but not by very much, he argued, as prices are already on the floor. The full presentation is in the next edition of the ArabianMoney newsletter (sign-up here).

John Mauldin reckoned financial markets could collapse within a couple of months if the eurozone fails to get its act together, though many delegates think that markets might just muddle through with a US election year coming up in 2012, not that they say that with much conviction.

Conference favorite Rick Rule warned his many clients in the audience of a rough road ahead with extreme volatility. The debates continue today, sadly without Marc Faber this year who is missed.

-- Posted Friday, 29 July 2011 | Digg This Article

About Peter Cooper:
Oxford University educated financial journalist Peter Cooper found himself made redundant by Emap plc in London in the mid-1990s and decided to rebuild his career in Dubai as launch editor of the pioneering magazine Gulf Business. He returned briefly to London in 1999 to complete his first book, a history of the Bovis construction group.

Then in 2000 he went back to Dubai to become an Internet entrepreneur, just as the dot-com market crashed. But he stumbled across the opportunity to become a partner in www.ameinfo.com, which later became the Middle East's leading English language business news website.

Over the course of the next seven years he had a ringside seat as editor-in-chief writing about the remarkable transformation of Dubai into a global business and financial hub city. At the same time www.ameinfo.com prospered and was sold in 2006 to Emap plc for $27 million, completing the career circle back to where it began a decade earlier.

He remains a lively commentator and columnist as a freelance journalist based in Dubai and travels extensively each summer with his wife Svetlana. His financial blog www.arabianmoney.net is attracting increasing attention with its focus on investment in gold and silver as a means of prospering during a time of great consumer price inflation and asset price deflation.

Order my book online from this link

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