I’m afraid it might have been me. Not the business model, the term for it. read more »

Dear Ma,

Hey, thanks for the cookies, terrific as usual! Sorry I haven’t called but I’ve been slammed. read more »

In my last three posts I took issue with the idea that faster growth in the emerging economies would necessarily lead to better investment returns; I took issue with the EM growth story itself, suggesting that the developmental model for emerging societies may be irretrievably broken; and I pointed out that for emerging societies to truly emerge and stay emerged, they had to develop inclusive civil societies, which few seem likely to do. read more »

In Part 1 of this series I suggested that the mere fact the emerging markets are growing faster than developed markets is no reason to overweight the former in our portfolios. In Part 2, I took issue with the very question of whether most of the emerging societies will actually emerge, given questions about the historical developmental model. read more »

My heart tells me that the best possible thing that could happen in this world over the next decade would be for all the emerging markets to emerge successfully. That would pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into something approaching middleclass-hood. But my brain tells me that even if that happened, overweighting EM might not be a good trade. (See Part 1.) Worse, my hunch tells me that most of them won’t even emerge. read more »