Coming out of one of the darkest recessions, have we learned the lesson at all? Or are we going to repeat the mistakes of the past again?

Khuram Maqsood, managing director of boutique corporate financing advisory firm Emirates Capital, thinks we may well repeat them.

He says a second wave in the downturn – if it comes at all – is unlikely to come from a new, unseen fault in world markets.

“The second wave’s going to come from exactly the same place the first wave came from –which is short attention spans, short memories,” he tells Reuters Investment summit in Dubai.

“Even in 2009 you’re beginning to see some of the issues that brought the global economy to its knees creeping up again, like executive pay for example.

“Again we’re beginning to see too much leverage seeping into different parts of the global economy, so it seems there are similar things which encroach back into the playing field and I think that’s the risk.”

Ever wonder how the U.S. Treasury Secretary gets through some of the most economically stressful times this country has seen in a while — does he go for long runs? Sleep two hours a night?

Timothy Geithner has been in the job less than a year, and came in after the economy had slumped into recession. Now unemployment is approaching 10 percent, he’s had to navigate through an economic stimulus package, and on top of all that the weakness of the U.S. dollar has other countries questioning whether it should still be the reserve currency.

Enough problems, we imagine, to give anyone a big giant headache and more than a few sleepless nights.

So what does Geithner do under the weight of it all?

“I’ve been in the middle of this for quite a long time,” he said in an interview at the Reuters Washington Summit on Tuesday. (Remember, before this job, Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank).

His general approach, Geithner said, is to “focus on trying to make sure you’re making the best of a bunch of bad choices.”

And to make sure “you are helping the president make sensible decisions,” he said.

“I think the basic imperative in these things is just to make sure people understand that we’re not going to debate when there’s a problem anymore, we’re not going to like hope it takes care of itself, we’re going to commit to fix it,” Geithner said. “And we’re going to do what it takes to fix it.”

For more news from the Reuters Washington Summit, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Geithner at Reuters Washington Summit)

  By Neil Chatterjee
    The U.S. has promised it will hunt down tax evaders.
    And it seems tax evaders are on the run.
    DBS bank, based in the growing offshore financial centre of
Singapore, told Reuters it had been approached by U.S. citizens
asking for its private banking services. But when told they would
have to sign U.S. tax declaration forms, the potential clients
disappeared.  
    Swiss banks also approached DBS on the hope they could
offload troublesome U.S. clients to a location that so far has
not been reached by the strong arms of Washington or Brussels.
    DBS said no thanks. In fact many private banks and boutique
advisors now seem to be avoiding U.S. clients.
    Will this spread to other nationalities, as governments
invest in tax spies and tax havens invest in white paint?
    Is this the end of offshore private private banking?

Reuters Central European Investment Summit, September 28-30, 2009

The former Communist countries of central Europe have been the last to be hit by the global economic crisis, but th e hit they took was among the hardest. Only big neighbour Russia’s deep plunge into recession is rivaling the sharp fall from record economic growth that’s in store this year for the economies between the former Soviet Union and Western Europe.

Global risk aversion and deleveraging exposed the weaknesses that the countries had been able to gloss over during the boom years – which in retrospect appeared to have been, in some countries, a colossal binge bankrolled by cheap foreign credit extended by Western European banks that had to come to an end when funding dried up.

Even the specter of a region-wide meltdown lingered over the countries this winter as investors turned a blind eye on the differences between fundamentally sound countries like Poland, and Ukraine, Hungary or Romania, which could avert the threat of default, social unrest and instability only with aid from the IMF and the European Union.

But since the IMF and the EU moved in and made clear they would let no country fail, a pickup in risk appetite has driven up emerging European assets to the extent that some investors already worry about the next bubble inflating.

Worries remain. Many of the region’s export-geared countries’ recovery will depend on a return of demand for their exports in Western Europe. Unemployment is on the rise. Budget deficits balloon. And the mostly Western-owned banks still face an inevitable rise in bad debt that will continue well into next year and could thwart a fledgling economic pickup.

Key policymakers and corporate leaders will discuss these and related issues at the Reuters Central European Investment Summit on Sept. 28-30 in Vienna and Warsaw. We will be blogging about it here.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk gestures as he speaks during a conference at the Warsaw Stock Exchange August 28, 2009. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

The global paper industry has struggled for more than six years to claw its way out of a slump, as soft demand and overcapacity have kept prices down, leading to poor earnings, production curtailments and layoffs.

The current global downturn has further eroded demand for basic materials, including paper, as print advertising has dropped steeply in the crisis. Companies have been forced to run just to stand still, temporarily or permanently shutting mills and axing staff.

The sector is now at a crossroads. Will businesses after the recession look roughly the same, only smaller? Will demand ever return when electronic books and newspapers are surging? With many forestry companies big producers of biomass, what role will green energy play in the future?

From the start, “green shoots of recovery” was not necessarily the British government’s wisest choice of words and after a few months of being on everyone’s lips, has given way to a more lowly metaphor.
Business Minister Baroness Vadera raised the hackles of the political opposition in January when she spotted “a few green shoots” on a day of large-scale job losses and collapsing share prices.
Evidence of economic revival is still elusive, but there are ever louder hints that we have at least seen the worst — or bottomed, to use the mot du jour.
Bottom as a noun and a verb was widely brandished by speakers attending Reuters Global Energy Summit this week, who based on their analysis on a slight increase in available credit, a tentative pick up in energy demand and rising commodity prices.
OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri has an interest in spotting the kind of confidence that has driven oil prices up from a low below $35 a barrel in December to almost double that.
“I have no doubt that the recession has bottomed out, but is it a V shape or a U shape?” he asked during a Reuters summit session.
Others were less convinced and the most bearish of them all was a representative of the very oversupplied tanker market, where freight rates have sunk to their lowest levels in decades, with not a green shoot in sight.
“We have seen lower than the bottom,” said Erik Ranheim, a manager at oil tanker association Intertanko.

    The sprouting of privately-held alternative trading venues has seriously mucked up the trading landscapes in the United States and elsewhere, or so says Thomas Caldwell, chairman and chief executive of Caldwell Financial.
    Caldwell, founder of a major exchange investment firm, sees a world that has quickly evolved into one of nimble, electronic players coupled with more and more trading venues with the proliferation of alternative trading systems, or ATSs.
    (They’re also called electronic communications networks (ECNs) in the United States and multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) in Europe).
    These new venues, which can include the ominously-named dark pools, or alternative venues, where they can secretly match buy and sell orders, leads to, among other things, “deeply flawed” pricing for market participants, in Caldwell’s view.
    The idea of bank-backed stock trading venues is also suspect, says Caldwell.
    “Publicly-owned exchanges, open and visible trading, an auction market environment,” he said during the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit in New York.
    “These are centerpieces if you really want an economy to grow and you want to encourage entrepreneurs with access to capital. The more we get into gamesmanship and side products and all this other stuff it depletes from this.”
    (Posted by Jennifer Kwan)

Priceline.com CEO Jeff Boyd told the Reuters Travel and Leisure Summit in New York that he thinks that at least two out of the four players in the online travel sector - Priceline, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia - could be in a position for either an IPO or a sale once the economy turns up.

“I think that the most important fact there is that two of the major players are owned by private equity,” he said. ”Orbitz is controlled by Blackstone. And Travelocity and Sabre Group are controlled by TPG and Silver Lake Partners. And what that means is eventually they will be looking for a way to monetize those private equity investments, and there’s two ways of doing it.

One is through a public offering and the other is a sale. So, eventually there’s going to be some transactions there, and that could be a catalyst to some consolidation.”

That was the advice from truck manufacturer Navistar International Corp’s CEO Dan Ustian at this week’s Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago.

Ustian said the current slowdown has been worse and deeper than expected — even though the trucking industry had a sense that things were starting to go south as far back as 2007.

Ustian, one of our featured guests on the first day of the summit, told Reuters that the trucking industry is a great place for people to start if they want to get a good read on the economy. Most things that are made in the U.S. get where they’re going with the help of a truck somewhere along the way.

The breadth of the company’s businesses supports his view.

Navistar is a manufacturer of commercial trucks, IC Bus, LLC (IC) brand buses, MaxxForce brand diesel engines, Workhorse Custom Chassis, LLC (WCC) brand chassis for motor homes and step vans, Navistar Defense, LLC military vehicles, and is a provider of service parts for all makes of trucks and trailers. Additionally, it also designs and manufactures diesel engines for pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs.

The Manufacturing and Transportation Summit continues through Thursday in Chicago.

Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take Two Interactive, has a bone to pick with the media: He doesn’t like the two words “Financial” and ”Crisis.” At least not when they are used to describe the current state of economic affairs.

“I don’t think we’re in a financial crisis,” Zelnick said at the Reuters Media Summit. “The use of the word crisis — I’m loathe to be critical of the media since I’m every bit a part of the media — but I don’t think the word has been especially helpful. We’re obviously in a recession and these are very very trying times.”

If not a financial crisis, then what? Well, Zelnick offers up a hospital metaphor. 

“We’re still seeing the car crash, and the ambulences are still showing up at the scene. Maybe we’re in the emergency room, but we’re not even in the intensive care unit yet for a lot of these companies. But they will get there.”

Call it what you like. Either way, It’s not pretty.

(Photo: Reuters)